John William Waterhouse presented this painting to the Royal Academy after his election as an Academician. From the 1880s Waterhouse exhibited at the Royal Academy and the New Gallery both complex compositions with many figures as well as single figures often taken from literature or Greek mythology. It is possible that Waterhouse’s painting of A Mermaid was inspired by Alfred Lord Tennyson’s poem The Mermaid (1830) which includes the lines:

‘Who would be
A mermaid fair,
Singing alone,
Combing her hair’

Tennyson’s poem goes on to describe the mermaid seeking and finding love among the mermen:

‘Of the bold merry mermen under the sea.
They would sue me, and woo me, and flatter me,
In the purple twilights under the sea;
But the king of them all would carry me,
Woo me, and win me, and marry me.’

However Waterhouse was also interested in the darker mythology of the mermaid as an enchantress. Mermaids traditionally were sirens who lured sailors to their death through their captivating song. They were also tragic figures as mermaids could not survive in the human world which they yearned for and men could not exist in their watery realm, so any relationship was doomed. In Waterhouse’s painting no sailors are depicted so that despite being a ‘siren’ the mermaid is shown as an alluring rather lonely figure, albeit with a fish tail. The atmosphere evoked is one of gentle melancholy as the mermaid sits alone in an isolated inlet, dreamily combing out her long hair with her lips parted in song. Beside her is a shell filled with pearls, which some believed to be formed from the tears of dead sailors.

When the work was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1901 the Art Journal (p.182) noted her ‘wistful-sad look’ and the review remarked that ‘it tells of the human longings never to be satisfied … The chill of the sea lies ever on her heart; the endless murmur of the waters is a poor substitute for the sound of human voices; never can this beautiful creature, troubled with emotion, experience on the one hand unawakened repose, on the other the joys of womanhood’.

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This picture has been traditionally known as St Joan but this title does not fit the subject of a nude youth holding a crucifix made from a bull-rush. The earliest recorded use of this title seems to be a sale in 1937, twenty years after the artist’s death. It is more likely that the title is a misreading of St John and that the subject is the youth of John the Baptist – the rushes symbolising the River Jordan. Whatever the subject of the painting, it dates from a very early period in the artist’s career, probably the early 1870s, perhaps even predating his debut at the Royal Academy summer exhibition in 1874.

– From Sotheby’s catalogue.

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This rediscovery is a rare example of Waterhouse’s early work, full of spontaneous charm and luscious colour. Waterhouse had painted Middle Eastern subjects in the earliest years of his career in the 1870s, including The Slave of 1872 (private collection) and An Unwelcome Companion – A Street Scene in Cairo (Townley Hall Art Gallery and Museum, Burnley). However, the style of the present picture is more sophisticated and it is likely that it dates to the first half of the next decade. The resemblance of the model in the present picture to the prophetess in Consulting the Oracle of 1884 (Tate), suggests that it is contemporary. The two pictures share an Orientalist setting with pierced woodwork, hanging lamps, Turkish carpets and a striped banquette. Whilst the oracular subject was a large, dramatic and rather macabre picture, the present painting is more light-hearted and more easily understood. The subject of a woman dressing her hair was explored in At Capri of 1889 and prefigured the artist’s A Mermaid painted in 1900 (Diploma Collection, Royal Academy of Art). There are two similar pictures by Waterhouse, An Eastern Interior with a Seated Girl dated 1886 (Bonham’s, 12 December 2013, lot 63) and An Eastern Reminiscence (private collection) which probably also dates to the early 1880s. The inclusion of the potted star-gazer lily and the qabqab (wooden Ottoman stilt shoes) inlaid with mother-of-pearl, adds to the exoticism of the painting.

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Like many of the early Pre-Raphaelites who came before him, John William Waterhouse found inspiration in the romantic narratives of the Middle-Ages. While based loosely on verifiable facts, the legend of Rosamund and Queen Eleanor is likely as much of a fairy tale as it is an accurate account, but nonetheless its violence and eroticism provided a compelling subject for many Victorian painters including Edward Burne-Jones, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Frederick Sandys and Arthur Hughes, as well as writers Alfred Tennyson and Algernon Charles Swinburne.

At the age of fifteen, Eleanor of Aquitaine married Louis VII, heir to the French throne. She presided over one of the most joyful courts in Europe, filled with troubadours, poets and romantic adventures. Sadly, when she could not bear her husband a son, their marriage was annulled and she married Henry II, Duke of Normandy and future king of England (ruling from 1154-89). For Eleanor, her years in England did not hold the gaiety of her time in France or as they did for her husband and his many mistresses. In Waterhouse’s depiction of the tale, he depicts the moment in which Queen Eleanor penetrates the labyrinthine castle that Henry built for his mistress Rosamund, intent upon killing her rival. The queen holds a strand of the very thread which Rosamund uses in her weaving, depicting three riders approaching a castle, which she used to guide her through the maze and to her victim. As Peter Trippi describes the scene: “Rosamond pauses to watch for her lover, unaware that her life will be cut like the thread that betrays her. Her namesake flower winds precariously along the window, symbolizing the love that offends the homely queen, glimpsed through the curtains ominously decorated with sword-brandishing riders. The threat Rosamond poses to Eleanor is reinforced by her little crown. Although a concubine, Rosamond holds the kneeling position and clasped hands of sainthood, converting this scene into a morbid variant of the Annunciation; she was buried at a nunnery and venerated as a martyr to Eleanor’s hatred” (Trippi, p. 224).

Fair Rosamund was once held in the collection of William Hesketh Lever, the millionaire soap manufacturer and founder of the Lady Lever Art Gallery in Port Sunlight (in memory of his late wife). Lever had built a legendary art collection of more than 20,000 objects, including important examples of eighteenth and nineteenth Century British artists, works by members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, and furniture and decorative arts. Lever vetted every acquisition personally and Fair Rosamund could be seen hanging prominently in the gallery at “The Hill”, Lever’s Queen Anne style red-brick mansion overlooking Hampstead Heath, which still stands today.

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Esther Kenworthy Waterhouse (1857–1944), born Esther Maria Kenworthy, was a British artist who exhibited her flower-paintings at the Royal Academy and elsewhere.
She was the daughter of James Lees Kenworthy, an artist and schoolmaster from Ealing, in West London; and Elizabeth, a school-mistress.

She married fellow artist John William Waterhouse at the parish church in Ealing, in 1883, and thereafter used the name Esther Kenworthy Waterhouse. Initially, they lived in a purpose built artistic colony in Primrose Hill, where the houses had studios. In around 1900, they moved to St John’s Wood.

She is buried, along with her husband, at Kensal Green Cemetery.

Waterhouse’s portrait of her is now owned by Sheffield City Art Galleries.

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This painting depicts a scene from the poem The Lady of Shalott by Alfred Lord Tennyson. It is a study for the finished work of the same title at Leeds City Art Gallery. Many experts prefer the vitality and energy of this study.

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John William Waterhouse is recognised for his depictions of femmes fatales in many forms, often inspired by Greek mythology—Pandora, sirens, the sorceress Circe—or tragic heroines with literary origins such as Ophelia and the Lady of Shalott. Early in his career, Waterhouse produced several ‘orientalist’ works as well as many paintings of domestic life in the ancient world in the vein of Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema and Frederic Leighton. The magic circle 1886 unites this foundation with the artist’s growing interest in the occult, but represents a stylistic departure from the carefully detailed clarity prized by the Victorians; it has a strong affinity with French painting of the era, especially the work of Jules Bastien-Lepage. (1) These elements, combined with the night-time setting, create a hazy, mysterious atmosphere suitable to the subject: a sorceress in the midst of performing a ritual. With a snake coiled around her neck, she draws a fiery circle around herself and her boiling cauldron. A conspiracy of ravens looks on and, in the background, hooded figures watch from the entrance of a cave. The cliff-top is lined with onlookers, an unlit city looming over them. The woman holds a sickle that she has used to cut the ingredients for her potion; a pile of poppies and other flowers lie beside the fire, and still more are thrust through the sash at her waist.

The intent of the painting is enigmatic, in part because so many cultural elements have been combined: the early Anglo-Saxon hairstyle and the Greek or Persian image of figures at battle on the otherwise medieval dress, the druidic knife and the arid, vaguely Mediterranean landscape present a confusing melange of civilisations. (2) While the original Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood strove for authenticity through detail, Waterhouse here creates an atmosphere in spite of the details. Although the symbolic meaning is imprecise, it is likely that the intent of the spell is good: outside the protective circle sinister symbols loom, but inside is a powerful woman who is not vauntingly sexualised as are so many of Waterhouse and his contemporaries’ more dangerous subjects. Bathed in soft light, she is surrounded by flowers and wearing a girdle, symbolic of fertility rather than sexuality. (3)

While the painting itself has an air of the exotic, this relatively benign image of feminine power has more in common with the Victorian drawing room than is immediately apparent: séances and other spiritualist gatherings were the delight of the age and by no means incompatible with respectable womanhood. It has been suggested that the plume of steam rising from the cauldron is about to coalesce into form in the manner of ectoplasm, regularly encountered at such gatherings. (4) Although the painting was critically acclaimed when exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1886, its dramatism was lampooned by Punchcartoonist Harry Furniss, who pictured the actress Sarah Bernhardt—known for her enthusiasm for spiritualism and for sleeping in a coffin—stirring a cauldron with a giant spoon. (5)

– Bronwyn Campbell

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1. Elizabeth Prettejohn, Peter Trippi, Robert Upstone and Patty Wageman, JW Waterhouse: The modern Pre-Raphaelite, Royal Academy of Arts, London, 2008, p 106.
2. Frances Fowle, ‘John Williams Waterhouse: The magic circle’, at tate.org.uk, accessed 16 July 2018.
3. Peter Trippi, JW Waterhouse, Phaidon Press, London and New York, 2002, p 90.
4. As above, p 77.
5. As above.