Sleep and his Half-brother Death

Waterhouse was 25 when he sent this to the Royal Academy in 1874, his first time exhibiting there, and it came out of real grief. His mother had died of tuberculosis when he was a boy, and the same illness took his younger brothers. The subject is two figures from Greek myth, Hypnos and Thanatos, sleep and death, whom the ancients called brothers because they resembled each other so closely. Waterhouse keeps them almost identical in pose but separates them with light. One lies bathed in a warm glow with poppies in his hand, the flower of sleep and of numbing. The other is turned into shadow. Knowing what he had just lost at home, the choice to make death simply the darker twin of sleep reads less like a lesson than like a wish.