Ulysses and the Sirens

John William Waterhouse

Oil on canvas

National Gallery of Victoria

Painted in 1891 and exhibited that year at the Royal Academy in London, Ulysses and the Sirens depicts the climactic episode from Homer's Odyssey in which Odysseus, bound to the mast of his ship, resists the deadly enchantment of the Sirens while his crew rows on with wax-stopped ears. Waterhouse departed from popular Victorian convention by rendering the Sirens not as mermaid-like figures but as bird-bodied creatures with the faces of beautiful women, a choice inspired by a fifth-century BC Greek stamnos in the British Museum. The painting exemplifies Waterhouse's mature Pre-Raphaelite manner — richly colored, archaeologically informed, and charged with psychological tension — combining careful compositional balance with an atmosphere of menace that contemporary critics acknowledged as a significant advance in his work. An English painter born in Rome in 1849 and trained at the Royal Academy, Waterhouse made Classical mythology and Arthurian legend the twin pillars of a prolific career, earning the enduring sobriquet "the modern Pre-Raphaelite."