Circe Offering the Cup to Ulysses

Waterhouse painted this in 1891, when British artists were still mining Greek myth for subjects, and he picks the moment from the Odyssey when the sorceress Circe holds out a drugged cup to Ulysses. She has already turned his crew into swine, and you can find one of them, a pig, at her feet. Look at the round mirror behind her throne. Ulysses himself is there, small and armed, reflected as he approaches, so the man she is about to trap is already in the picture before he arrives. Waterhouse liked that mirror trick and used it again a few years later for his Lady of Shalott. Circe raises the cup and stares straight out, offering it as much to us as to him.