The Fisherman and the Syren

The subject comes straight from a short poem by Goethe, written in 1779, in which a mermaid rises to scold a fisherman for luring her children to their deaths, then draws him down into the water by the pull of her own beauty. Leighton catches the moment of surrender: she has her arms around his neck, and he is already leaning toward the sea. He was still in his twenties, years before he became president of the Royal Academy and the grandest painter in Victorian Britain. The picture is small, just two full-length figures, and he first showed it in London in 1858. The widow of the geologist Charles Lyell gave it to Bristol in 1938.