John William Waterhouse painted A Mermaid in 1900 as his Diploma Work for the Royal Academy of Arts. Every new Academician had to deposit a painting with the institution, and Waterhouse delivered his five years after being elected to full membership in 1895. It was shown at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition in 1901 and it still belongs to the Academy's collection in London.
A mermaid who is not singing
Waterhouse took his inspiration from Tennyson's 1830 poem The Mermaid, and he had already made an oil sketch of the subject in 1892. What he painted is the opposite of the sirens and temptresses most Victorian viewers expected. She sits on a rocky shore, pulling a lock of her long red-brown hair across her body, her silver-grey tail curled over the stones. She is not luring anyone. She glances out of the frame with a wary, almost startled look, as if something has just interrupted her.
Details worth finding
A sea arch opens in the cliffs behind her, and the water rolls in over the pebbles. At the lower left an open shell holds a string of pearls. Victorian painters loved the mermaid because she could carry two moods at once: desire and loneliness. Hans Christian Andersen's The Little Mermaid, published in 1837, had made her longing for human love one of the great sad stories of the century, and Waterhouse's version leans toward that sadness.
Little-known facts
- The diploma-work rule meant the painting had to represent the artist at his best, so Waterhouse chose a subject he had been developing for about eight years.
- The 1892 oil sketch shows how long he lived with the idea before committing it to a full canvas.
- The picture belongs to the Royal Academy itself, which is unusual for a work by an artist so often seen in private collections.
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