In the aftermath of a shipwreck, an exhausted survivor struggles towards the safety of the shore. He clings to an algae-clad rock without the strength to pull himself from the dark waters that surge and ebb around him. The treacherous currents and undertows threaten to pull him under the waves and almost all his strength is gone. At this moment of crisis, he is surprised by the beautiful vision of a young girl sitting on the rock above him with pearly-white skin and with lips parted in song. Her passive expression is enigmatic and whether she will help him or harm him we cannot know but we can be sure that he is spellbound by her pale beauty and magic song. Her abalone-shell harp and pearl hair decoration identify her as one of the sirens – ancient beguiling enchantresses of the ocean who lured mariners to their doom with their seductive song. The lower part of her legs, splashed by the spray of the sea, are magically transformed into the glistening fish scales and fins of a mermaid. Her hair is the auburn hue that in the nineteenth century became a potent symbol of the femme fatale. But she is not the vicious predatory sea-creature painted in continental Europe by the likes of Arnold Bocklin, Franz von Stuck or Gustave Moreau. She appears innocent of the harm her singing has caused and continues to pluck at the strings of her harp and gaze down at the drowning sailor below, as curious of him as he is of her.

Waterhouse seems to have conceived The Siren around the same time that he began a similarly sized painting A Mermaid(Royal Academy of Art, London), which was probably inspired by Tennyson’s poem of 1830 ‘The Mermaid’. It depicts a mermaid alone on a rocky beach combing her long hair and singing her fatal song. He had considered various poses for the mermaid, evidenced by a series of oil sketches and pencil drawings. It seems that one of those sketches led to the creation of an original composition in which he made her powerful enchantment more potent with the inclusion of the besotted, helpless mariner. A sketch for the initial idea for the composition which became The Siren was made in Waterhouse’s copy of the Poetic Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, although in that rough sketch there was a trio of mermaids. Waterhouse may have been partly inspired to depict the relationship between a mermaid and a doomed mariner by seeing at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition in 1886, The Depths of the Sea (private collection) by his artistic hero Edward Burne-Jones, which also depicts a mermaid unaware of her deadliness to the mortal lovers of her song as she drags the body of a naked mariner deeper into her watery grotto.

In 1900 Waterhouse also painted Nymphs Finding the Head of Orpheus (Collection of Sir Tim Rice) which was probably based upon the same sketches that inspired The Siren. In this picture, two naiads (water nymphs) are looking down into a dark pool at the floating head of the musician Orpheus and the relationship between the female and male figures is very alike the siren and mariner.

In this painting the siren has become the ultimate fin-de-siecle hallucinatory presence, whose beauty could only be seen by those already powerless to her enchanted music. Like Waterhouse’s hero Hylas in the painting Hylas and the Nymphs of 1895, who is on the brink of being pulled to his watery death, the mariner in The Siren will slip down into the shadowy depths. For Waterhouse the siren represented the same subject as Circe, la Belle Dame sans Merci, Medea and Lamia – women whose beauty and magical powers made them personify dangerous femininity. However the intensity of the moment is the main idea of the picture rather than a depiction of a specific literary or mythological figure or episode of a narrative drama – this is very different from Waterhouse’s earlier depiction of the sirens, Ulysses and the Sirens of 1891 (National Gallery of Victoria, Australia) which sought to depict the Homeric sirens as half-bird-half-woman launching a terrifying assault on Ulysses’ ship. Whilst the earlier picture was a whirling maelstrom of a composition suggesting noise, violence, terror and hunger, The Siren captures the eerie and silent tension between the seductress and her devotee/prey. The 1891 picture was based upon a design depicted on a classical vase at the British Museum and has an unconvincing artificiality whilst The Siren seems to be a far more personal vision concentrated on human emotion and desire.

The Siren was probably commissioned by the art dealers Thomas Agnew’s, who sold it on 1 February 1901 for £450. It was bought by the industrial engineer and amateur artist James Gresham (1836-1914), founder of Gresham & Graven, manufacturers of brake equipment for railway vehicles. Gresham had a remarkable life story – when he was attending a grammar school in Newark he broke his leg and was taken to hospital in Lincoln by carriage, which overturned and further damaged his leg so badly that it was amputated above the knee. He developed his own artificial leg and with a keen mind for business he patented his design and used the money that was generated to pay for drawing lessons at the South Kensington School of Art. Here he met and befriended the artist William Powell Frith who encouraged his studies. It soon became clear that Gresham lacked the inspirational spark and originality to make him a great painter and when in 1856 he saw an advert for the position of a Sketching Clerk to assist the Secretary of the Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition, he was encouraged to apply. His fortune was made in engineering but he retained his love of modern art and he became an avid connoisseur. Among the many pictures in his collection were The Soldier of Marathon by Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema (Sotheby’s, New York, 20 April 2005, lot 71, formerly owned by the fashion designer Gianni Versace), The Lantern Maker’s Courtship by William Holman Hunt (Manchester City Art Gallery) and La Pia by Dante Gabriel Rossetti (Spencer Museum of Art, University of Kansas). It is interesting that another of the pictures in his collection was The Cave of the Storm Nymphsby Edward Poynter (sold in these rooms, 2 November 1994, lot 215) which depicts a similar saltwater fantasy to Waterhouse’s The Siren.

Following Gresham’s death The Siren was offered again at auction and attracted the attention of one of the greatest industrialists of his generation, William Hesketh Lever, 1^st Viscount Leverhulme. His prowess in industry was matched by his connoisseurship and with the vast proceeds of his soap factories Viscount Lever amassed a collection of over 20,000 items and built the model village at Port Sunlight with an art gallery at its heart to contain the majority of his collection. Lever seems to have begun acquiring pictures by Waterhouse in 1916 when he bought Fair Rosamund (Sotheby’s, New York, 9 May 2014, lot 27) from the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition and also The Decameron (now the Lady Lever Art Gallery, Port Sunlight). The Siren was probably the next picture by Waterhouse to enter the Leverhulme collection in 1917 and he also purchased three other pictures by Waterhouse; The Love Philtre (present whereabouts unknown) and An Al Fresco Toilet at Capri (private collection) both sold in 1926 and the unfinished The Enchanted Garden which he bought from the artist’s widow (Lady Lever Art Gallery, Port Sunlight).

– From Sotheby’s catalogue.

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‘The modern artist feels even the direct charm of the beautiful old stories with wistful desire for a like effortless simplicity of expression, flowing so clearly and steadily from sensation. And how delightful the contents of those tales considered as imagery of what is inmost in thought and feeling: how enviable a poetry seems the life which found such lyrical tongue!’

– Anthony Hobson, The Art of J.W. Waterhouse

Waterhouse plundered the myths of the ancient Greeks and Romans for tales of metamorphosis, betrayal, enchantment and transgression. However his depiction of the Mediterranean legends was an Englishman’s and his romances are usually firmly rooted amid a very British idyll. His models resemble the modern girls and boys of nineteenth century London more than the demi-gods and nymphs of Sparta and Rome. His paintings are easy to understand and relate to as they seem to depict ordinary humans – albeit particularly young and beautiful ones. As Waterhouse’s latest biographer Peter Trippi has observed; ‘Waterhouse’s appeal also derives, in large part, from his subjects. Whatever their literary sources, mystical experiences of emotional or physical transformation clearly moved Waterhouse… Many viewers take pleasure in the myths and poems that Waterhouse illustrated. Although a shrinking percentage of schoolchildren are taught mythology, the universality of human experience reflected by Greek myth reassures readers worldwide as it did Waterhouse.’ (Peter Trippi, J.W. Waterhouse, 2002, pp.235-236)

According to Pindar and Ovid Phyllis was a Princess of Thrace, a kingdom that had been allied to the Trojans during the bloody war. On his return voyage to Athens, Demophoön the son of Phaedra and the hero Theseus, stopped at Thrace and fell in love with the beautiful Phyllis. They became betrothed but on the day after their marriage Demophoön returned to his homeland, promising to soon return for Phyllis. Inheriting a wandering nature from his father, Demophoön tarried on the island of Cyprus. Believing that she had been forsaken, the grief-stricken and impatient Princess killed herself after only one month of waiting for her beloved. Pallas Athena the Goddess of Wisdom took pity on the bereft girl’s death and turned her lifeless body into an almond tree which grew tall and strong from her tomb but never bore blossom. Demophoön returned to the shores of Thrace to reclaim his wife but she was no-where to be found. He roamed the countryside looking for Phyllis until he eventually happened upon her tomb upon which was a bitter recrimination that blamed him for her death. Consumed by grief and guilt, Demophoön fell to his knees before her epitaph and his tears fell upon the ground at the base of the almond tree which began to burst into flower as life returned to the body of the girl trapped within. The bark tore open and Phyllis appeared from the heart of the tree where she had been in stasis.

Waterhouse painted the tale of Phyllis and Demophoön in a picture of 1907 (private collection), in which he kneels amongst crocuses that have grown around the maiden’s tomb. The present picture appears to depict the same subject and whilst it is now a single-figure subject, her leaning gesture suggests that she may have originally been accompanied by Demophoön. Waterhouse would often allow his compositions to emerge on the canvas, sketching in paint and building up the finish. He has begun to suggest the city of Thrace in the background, over which a large temple looms with towering classical columns which identifies the subject as set in antiquity.

The element of a woman emerging from the wood of a tree had been depicted by Waterhouse in his A Hamadryad of 1893 (Plymouth Museum & Art Gallery) and in Echo and Narcissus of 1903 (Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool). This motif of a nude girl emerging from a blossoming tree may be traceable back to a picture by Sir Edward Burne-Jones depicting the myth of Phyllis, The Tree of Forgiveness painted in 1882 (Lady Lever Art Gallery, Port Sunlight). However the pose appears to have been inspired by a series of pictures by Waterhouse depicting a very different, medieval subject of a maiden gathering flowers. The most finished of these is a delightful watercolour entitled Spring – The Flower Picker painted c.1900 (Collection of Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber) but there is also a small oil version and a related sketch. The present picture has become known as The Flower Picker because of the similarity in pose to the earlier work but there seems no reason to think that she is picking flowers.

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Gather Ye Rosebuds While Ye May beguiles the viewer with its otherworldly beauty.  Set against a warm green ground and sunny sky, two maidens clad in blue-violet and pink robes bend to pluck delicate buds, grasping their bouquets close to their bodies.  With such visual splendor the work’s narrative may seem secondary.  Yet the composition’s date of 1909 and its similarity to a number of Waterhouse’s compositions in following years marks it as the first in a series inspired by the story of Persephone—in which the innocent girl, picking flowers on the plain of Enna, is abducted by Pluto; in anguish, her mother, the harvest goddess Demeter, curses the world with a prolonged winter broken only by her daughter’s return to earth each Spring.

By the late nineteenth century Persephone’s story and other tales from Classical mythology had been reimagined by contemporary authors, and provided inspiration for many Pre-Raphaelite painters. Indeed, Waterhouse had established his reputation in the 1880s and 1890s as a painter of literary and mythological subjects, frequently featuring beautiful young girls, but also introducing themes with tragic implications.  Works such as Ophelia and Miranda (Shakespeare), The Lady of Shallot (Tennyson), Phyllis and Demophoön (Fig.1) and Apollo and Daphne (inspired by ancient mythology) solidified Waterhouse’s renown as one of the last and greatest subject painters of British art.  Beyond the literary associations, these diverse subjects shared a linked theme of metamorphosis, in which a female figure left one state of existence for another. Waterhouse often allegorized this transformation by connecting women with the beauty, simplicity and decay of flowers; women and flowers alike possessed the “seeds of new growth” (Trippi, p. 197). From 1908 to 1914 flower-women assumed added significance for Waterhouse through a series of narrative-less images: in the first work titled Gather Ye Rosebuds While Ye May and its companion work The Soul of the Rose (fig. 2), he employed elements of Pre-Raphaelite medievalism or aesthetic portraits, complete with a Rossettian red-haired model dressed in medieval garb and set within dark, stained glassed interiors or sunny courtyards which suggested a setting from the Middle Ages or Renaissance.

The title of both the 1908 and present composition comes from the well-known poem by Robert Herrick (1591-1674), “To the Virgins, To Make Much of Time” which warns one must “Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,/ Old time is still a-flying,/ And the same flower that smiles to-day,/ To-morrow will be dying” (as quoted in Trippi, p. 197).  This warning is easily linked to the Persephone myth.  And while Waterhouse did not write about the specific significance of the story, it is often cited in the article about him written by Rose E.D. Sketchley and published in the 1909 Art Annual.  Sketchley believed Waterhouse’s work could be appreciated by any of those “who can feel the action of the spirit through the shape and course of Greek myth and medieval romance” (R.E.D. Sketchley, “J.W. Waterhouse, R.A.,” The Art Journal Christmas Number, London, 1909, p. 18 as quoted in Trippi, p. 198).   Given her frequent mention of it in the aritcle, it would appear “the last poem of living paganism,” De Raptu Prosephine (The Rape of Persephone), written in the manner of Ovid by Claudian (AD 370-404), was inspiration to Waterhouse.  Sketchley named Waterhouse as a Romantic visionary by linking his mythic pictures to Persephone’s tale. In earlier works, Waterhouse had already explored key aspects of Persephone’s story, the abduction and transformation of flower-picking women, the fleeting passage of beauty and the celebrated figures who visited Hades such as Odysseus, Adonis, Orpheus and Psyche.  Further he encountered Persephone throughout the literary canon, from Homer to Ovid to Milton, Shelley, and contemporary art theorists Algernon Swinburne and Water Pater (Trippi, p. 199).

 While many of these works focused on the trauma of Persephone’s dark descent to Hades, the present work reveals little of her brutal fate.  Waterhouse’s fields are bountiful with floral displays drenched in sunlight, suggesting only the unavoidable temptation of Persephone’s beauty, evoking her final moments of freedom before being spirited away. Tellingly, the maidens pick what appear to be narcissi and anemones.  Representing rebirth, legend told that narcissi grew at the edge of the stream where Narcissus drowned; anemones, representing forsaken or forgotten love, sprang up from the ground from the drops of blood of the gored body of Aphrodite’s love Adonis.  Other than these somewhat sinister symbols, Waterhouse allows his maidens to forage peacefully, their bodies gracefully bent as they pluck buds, the shifting tones of their togas suggesting gentle movement.  Thick brushstrokes build the distant mountain ranges of hazy blue tones, while more intricate applications of paint carefully describe the individual petals in the maidens’ hands. Persephone’s form is carefully constructed in Academic technique, the clearly defined lines of her bare arms and shoulders combining with the heavy folds of her robes to give her strong substance and weight. Yet her sun-burnished skin and loosely painted hair and face suggest a softer, vulnerable beauty.  In the shifts from precise detail and studied anatomy to impressionistic color tones and expressive textures, the present work reveals Waterhouse’s interest in allowing decorative forms, rather than explicit visual clues, to suggest narrative possibilities.  Indeed the work’s very title avoids an explicit description of the compositon’s subject.  In so doing, Gather ye Rosebuds while Ye May revives an appreciation of Waterhouse’s oeuvre, in which he experimented boldly with a myriad of elements and styles from academic conventions, the pictorial tenants of the Pre-Raphaelites, elements of Romanticism, Symbolism, and his own unique interests.

Despite its evident appeal, the work was never exhibited during Waterhouse’s lifetime and was long known only via a black and white photograph published in 1911.  This article was fully illustrated largely by works in the collections of the brothers Henry William Henderson (1852-1931) and Brodie Haldane Henderson (1869-1936), who at the time possessed many of the artist’s most remarkable compositions, including the aforementioned Soul of the Rose, acquired directly from the Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition.  Brodie was introduced to the artist by his older brother Alexander Henderson, yet another family member who actively collected the artist’s work.  The family’s shared fortune was the result of their incredible industry and success in newspapers, building railways, and other engineering projects.  Such financial and personal influence over the artist causes Peter Trippi to theorize that Brodie may have directly commissioned Waterhouse to complete the present work, particularly as it has such an unusual format, the only known work with a curved top.  Unframing the work reveals a painted gold ground suggesting the work was always intended to be this unique shape and to honor a particular request.  It is yet to be discovered how the impressive Gather Ye Rosebuds While Ye May left the family’s collection as there was no organized estate or collection sale upon Brodie’s death.  The works next known appearance in Canada makes sense, given the ties between Canada and Great Britain, and it is believed that the Henderson family had ancestral links to the provinces.

– From Sotheby’s catalogue.

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The Greek god of the North Wind who lived in Thrace. He is depicted as being winged, extremely strong, bearded and normally clad in a short pleated tunic. He is the son of Eos and Astraeus, and the brother of Zephyrus, Eurus and Notus. 
Boreas has two sons, two daughters and twelve mares which can race over the ground without destroying the grain. When the Persian navy of Xerxes threatened the city of Athens, the Athenians begged his assistance. The Great Wind of the Wintery North blew his anger at the Persians and 400 Persian ships sank immediately. Among other violent acts he abducted Oreithyia, the daughter of the king of Athens, when she was playing on the banks of the Ilissus. In Latin, he is called Aquilo.
The reappearance of Waterhouse’s Boreas in the saleroom in the mid 1990s caused a sensation as it had been lost for 90 years. Called Boreas after the north wind in Greek mythology, the work shows a young girl in a windswept landscape. In 1904 the Royal Academy notes described the subject as: “In wind-blown draperies of slate-colour and blue, a girl passes through a spring landscape accented by pink blossom and daffodils”. Since then, the picture’s whereabouts have been unknown and it was referred to as “lost” in Anthony Hobson’s 1989 biography of Waterhouse. 

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The present picture began as a sketch for Lamia painted in 1909 (private collection) in which the serpentine enchantress is contemplating her reflection in a woodland pool. Whilst composing Lamia Waterhouse was inspired to make several more variants of the composition, including The Necklace (private collection), in which the model is holding up a string of jewels taken from a casket – presumably the same jewel-box visible in the foreground of Vain Lamorina. The title Vain Lamorina was given by Anthony Hobson in 1980 which appears to be based upon a lable attached the the reverse. However the original title was Vain Lamorna, based upon a story by Mary de Morgan, included in her book On a Pincushion and other Fairy Tales which was illustrated by her brother William de Morgan, better-known as the famous potter. ‘The Story of Vain Lamorna’ tells of a beautiful farmer’s daughter whose reflection was stolen by the water-people when she was admiring herself in a stream to punish her for her vanity. The fairy-tale has a happy ending when Lamorna’s reflection is returned to her after she learns her lesson and is reunited with an admirer who she had cruelly treated.
Vain Lamorna was one of the pictures bought by ‘Harry’ Henry William Henderson (1862-1931) an avid collector of Waterhouse’s work, who also owned Ariadne of 1898 (private collection), Windflowers of 1902 (private collection), Phyllis and Demophoon (present whereabouts unknown) and Isabella and the Pot of Basil both painted in 1907 (private collection). Henderson’s brothers Alexander Lord Faringdon and Sir Brodie Haldane Henderson had made a fortune financing railroads across Argentina and Spain and were among Waterhouse’s most avid and prolific collectors, owning at least fifty of his paintings including St Cecilia and almost his entire output from the years between 1903 and 1914. Waterhouse also made portraits of Lady Violet Henderson, Mrs A P Henderson, Mrs Philip Henderson and Mrs Arnold Henderson. It seems that Waterhouse may have first met the Henderson family around 1900 when he painted Miss Margaret Henderson, Alexander’s daughter, to mark the occasion of her marriage to Captain Charles Schreiber.

Following Harry Henderson’s death in 1931 most of the paintings by Waterhouse were bequeathed to his son and to his grandson Johnny and the dispersal of the collection began around 1948 when Johnny Henderson sold fifteen oil paintings by Waterhouse at Christie’s. Among the pictures that can be identified are Isabella and the Pot of Basil and various large oil sketches for finished paintings. In 1950 three further pictures were sold by the Henderson estate, Ophelia said to have been exhibited at Burlington House in 1909, a sketch for The Love Philtre of 1914 and the present Vain Lamorna.

– From Sotheby’s catalogue.

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In 1916 Waterhouse submitted three works to the Royal Academy: the group composition A Tale from the Decameron along with two single figure works “I am Half Sick of Shadows,” said the Lady of Shalott and Miranda – The Tempest. As the titles suggest, Waterhouse had abandoned classical myths as subjects in favor of medieval and Renaissance narratives, often centering on a woman experiencing a revelation.  A conjoining motivation may have been patriotism inspired by the First World War, as many artists returned to themes from England’s past, including Arthurian legends and the works of Shakespeare. (Trippi, pp. 216-7).

The Tempest is one of Shakespeare’s most romantic plays, written late in his career, circa 1611; its original performance a year later coincided with the wedding of Elizabeth Stuart, the daughter of England’s James I to Frederick, the Elector Palatine, later King of Bohemia. Waterhouse first painted the play’s heroine Miranda in 1875. This earlier work depicts the play’s titular storm clouds gathering, a ship in miniature on the horizon-line, and the blond maiden, dressed in an Antique costume, seated demurely on a beach rock. While the artist experimented with another classicized study in a drawing of circa 1914-16, in contrast, the present, later composition heightens the dramatic intensity of the play’s first act in which “a brave vessel” carrying Miranda’s future lover, Ferdinand, is overtaken by violent waves and “dashed to pieces” (Act II; ii, 6;8). With the present work Waterhouse demonstrates the breadth of his skill as Miranda braces herself against the rising storm, her thick, auburn hair and the weighty folds of her fabric gripped by the winds. The pale hand held to her breast seemingly visualizes the moment when Miranda cries “Against my very heart. Poor souls, they perish’d. / Had I been any god of power, I would / Have sunk the sea within the earth or ere. It should the good ship so have swallow’d” (Act I:11, 8;12). Miranda is helpless to defend the sailors against the tempest conjured by her magician father Prospero to destroy the ship of his evil bother Antonio, who marooned them on an enchanted island.

As with many of Waterhouse’s single-figure pictures of women, Miranda is a legendary, mystical woman withdrawn from the world, her future in peril (though Miranda’s tale is one of the rare happy endings for the artist’s maidens) (Hobson, J.W. Waterhouse, p. 137). The present work also reflects Waterhouse’s fascination with magic, women, and the water recalling A Mermaid and The Siren (1900) (Trippi, p. 121-2). Miranda, her expression hidden from the viewer in three quarter profile, becomes a decorative object of dangerous beauty, her body surrounded by the violent bruised blue waves, the broken bits of Ferdinand’s ship’s mast suggesting the destructive, transformative power of love. In its imaginative interpretation of its literary source, complex layers of visual and allegorical meaning, and demonstration of a lifetime of artistic achievement, Miranda – The Tempest is considered one of the artist’s most accomplished later works. Waterhouse would return to the theme with a smaller scaled version of the present work exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1917 (Prettejohn, p. 192). – From Sotheby’s catalogue.

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