This early work by Leighton was inspired by a poem by the German Johann Wolfgang von Goethe which tells the story of a mermaid who rises from the waters to complain to a fisherman that he is enticing her children to death. Gradually the mermaid's own beauty lures the fisherman into the water and to oblivion. Here, in the central foreground, the dark-curled young man leans back dramatically against a rock face with the waves and the blond syren washing up against him from the left. The woman wraps her arms around his neck while the basket with his catch tumbles back into the sea on the right.

A contemporary critic noted the 'irresistible seductiveness' of the mermaid but he observed also that this 'young artist has plainly drunk long and eagerly at the fount of beauty that assuaged the thirst of Leonardo, Michelangelo and Raphael'.

Leighton is the only artist to have been elevated to the peerage. At the early age of forty-eight he became president of the Royal Academy and a pillar of the Victorian art establishment and the classical school.