The Siren

The Siren is an oil painting on canvas by John William Waterhouse, signed at lower right and completed around 1900; it measures 81 by 53 cm and is in a private collection.

A shipwrecked sailor, almost spent, clings to a weed-covered rock in dark water and looks up at a pale young woman seated above him. She plucks a lyre made from an abalone shell and wears pearls in her auburn hair, and below the knee her legs, splashed by spray, turn into the scales and fins of a mermaid. These details mark her as a siren, one of the sea enchantresses whose song lured sailors to their deaths. Waterhouse leaves her intention unclear: unlike the predatory sea creatures of Arnold Böcklin or Franz von Stuck, she seems as curious about the drowning man as he is about her. The picture contrasts sharply with Waterhouse's Ulysses and the Sirens of 1891, where the sirens are bird-women attacking a ship.

According to the Sotheby's catalogue, Waterhouse conceived the picture at about the same time as A Mermaid, his Royal Academy diploma work, and a first sketch, showing three mermaids, survives in his copy of Shelley's poems. Edward Burne-Jones's The Depths of the Sea, shown at the Royal Academy in 1886, may have been one inspiration.

The painting was probably commissioned by the dealers Agnew's, who sold it on 1 February 1901 for £450 to the engineer James Gresham of Ashton-on-Mersey. After his death his executors sold it at Christie's in 1917 to William Hesketh Lever, Lord Leverhulme, and it passed to the Lady Lever Art Gallery, which sold it in 1958. The American music executive Seymour Stein bought it at Sotheby's in 1985; offered in New York in 2003, it did not sell. At Sotheby's London on 12 July 2018 it fetched £3,835,800 against an estimate of £1 to 1.5 million, which Guinness World Records lists as the highest price paid at auction for a painting of a merperson.