Ulysse et les Sirènes

When Waterhouse showed this at the Royal Academy in 1891, the surprise was the sirens. Victorian audiences expected the mermaids and sea-nymphs of popular pictures, and instead they got creatures with the bodies of birds and the faces of women, wheeling down over Odysseus and his rowers. Waterhouse had gone to the British Museum and copied them from an ancient Greek vase, where the sirens really are winged and clawed. So the picture is closer to Homer than to the fashion of its own day. Odysseus is roped to the mast, exactly as the story asks, while his men bend to the oars with wax in their ears. Sir Hubert von Herkomer bought it that same year for the gallery in Melbourne, where it hangs now.