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.