The Siren

Waterhouse painted this around 1900, late in the long Victorian fascination with dangerous women out of myth. High on a rock sits a siren, a creature from Greek stories whose singing lured sailors to their deaths. She holds a harp made from an abalone shell and looks down, calm and unreadable, at a young man who has been shipwrecked and clings to the rock below, gazing up at her. It is left unclear whether she means to save him or finish him. Look at her legs and you can see she is still half sea creature, the skin below her knees turning to silvery fish scales. The painting has passed through private hands and has never hung in a public museum.