A Mermaid

A Mermaid is an oil painting on canvas by John William Waterhouse, dated 1900, which he presented to the Royal Academy of Arts in London as his diploma work; it remains in the Academy's collection.

Waterhouse was elected a full Royal Academician in 1895 and, like every new member, owed the Academy a representative work. He began A Mermaid soon afterwards, but according to Christie's it was not completed until 1901, and in the meantime he seems to have deposited his 1894 Ophelia as a temporary substitute. He had made an oil sketch for the subject as early as 1892 and tried out various poses in further oil sketches and pencil drawings. The finished picture was shown at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition of 1901.

The Academy suggests that the painting may have been inspired by Tennyson's poem The Mermaid of 1830, which begins by asking who would be a mermaid fair, singing alone, combing her hair. A young mermaid sits on the pebbles of a secluded inlet, combing out a long strand of her red hair with her lips slightly parted, her silver tail curled beneath her. Beside her lies an abalone shell filled with pearls, which some believed were formed from the tears of drowned sailors. Mermaids were traditionally sirens who lured sailors to their deaths, but no sailor appears here, and the Academy describes her, despite being a siren, as a rather lonely figure.

The canvas measures 96.5 by 66.6 cm. Anthony Hobson called it one of Waterhouse's most delicate conceptions, a picture he had taken a long time to perfect. Waterhouse developed the same theme in The Siren, painted around the same time, where a mermaid sings to a shipwrecked sailor.