The Mermaid
Pyle, Howard, American illustrator, painter, author, 1853-1911
1910
oil on canvas
Gift of the children of Howard Pyle in memory of their mother, Anne Poole Pyle, 1940

Half she drew him in, Half sank he in, And never more was seen.
Goethe, The Fisherman and the Siren

Howard Pyle left this painting in his Wilmington studio when he sailed for Italy in November of 1910. Since it was on his easel, he was probably working on it in the weeks before his departure and some of his students said, after his death, that Pyle did not consider the picture finished. But there is no reference to the picture in Pyle’s notes or letters or those of his students, so we have no external evidence about The Mermaid or Pyle’s intentions in painting it. Apparently it was not a commission for publication but rather an easel painting for himself. After Pyle’s death in Italy, Frank Schoonover, a Pyle student and an accomplished illustrator in his own right, saw fit to paint in the three fishes and the crab in the foreground, thereby adding an unfortunately pedestrian note to a work otherwise distinguished by mysterious characters and strangely-lit seas.

The Scene

An adult female, her lower body submerged, reaches up to embrace a man who has one foot in the water and one on a rock. Long swaths of iridescent silver-white flow away from her to the left; perhaps in the finished picture this would have been the mermaid’s traditional fish-tail. Coral, pearls, gems and fluid green strands of seaweed mingle with her abundant dark hair, drifting into the swirling sea-foam. Her bracelets and necklace flash gold in the light, even though the natural light of the sun comes from the opposite direction, illuminating the rocks at the right. The woman’s back arches, and her lips are parted, but her eyes are hidden by the man’s head. Her full, red mouth, its expression animated but ambiguous, calls up an inescapable comparison to the late Rossetti female models, such as Lady Lilith (1864-76) and Veronica Veronese (1872) in Gallery 10. The luxuriant hair is also reminiscent of the women in many Pre-Raphaelite paintings.

The man wears a lavender loincloth and an orange cap that recalls the “Phyrgian cap” of classical antiquity. He leans precipitously forward, intertwined with the woman, hovering between water and land. His face is much more androgynous than those of the robust men Pyle usually depicted. His eyes are closed, his face expressionless. He too has a Pre-Raphaelite mien, with the heavy features favored by such artists as Edward Burne-Jones, among others (see Burne-Jones’ The Council Chamber, 1872-92, in Gallery 10). His exaggerated mouth is certainly Rossettian (see Found, 1859, in Gallery 10).

The vibrant aquamarine waters seem to have their own internal light source, as the dull sun and murky sky (possibly an unfinished section) cast little light. The atmosphere gives an unnatural glow to both figures, rendering their pale skin slightly green. Deep swells surge in the background, breaking against the rocks and forming eddies of foam, enhancing the aura of danger as these two cling together.
The Story: Subject and Style

The mermaid is an enduring figure in the mythology, folklore, literature and art of many cultures, ancient and modern, around the world. The half-woman, half-fish probably had her origins in manatees and certain seals. These mammals nurse their young above the water’s surface, and their hairless faces and appealingly large eyes must have given them a resemblance to humans, especially at a distance, in days when people were used to anthropomorphizing the forces of nature. In fact, there were “sightings” of mermaids by European sailors as late as the eighteenth century.

In Greek mythology, mermaids (or sirens) lured sailors to shipwrecks with their beautiful singing. In the Middle Ages, mermaids in cathedral carvings personify the vice of sexual passion. Eighteenth and nineteenth century poets and artists used the femme fatale of the deep. to seduce earthbound, and ultimately drowned, men. Keats and Goethe created complex tragic plots on the theme. Several Pre-Raphaelite and Symbolist pictures, historical and fanciful, include the mermaid, and William Morris incorporated her into wallpaper design. In the twentieth century, the Surrealists recalled her dream-like allure. Freudian and post-Freudian thinkers assigned psycho-sexual meanings to the mermaid. In the European folklore and fairy tale revival of the nineteenth century, authors such as Hans Christian Andersen cloaked the mermaid’s charm in sentimental religiosity, with references to her “soul.” Time, place, details (and psychological sublimation levels) vary, but one element always present in the mermaid myth is the sexual seduction that leads a man to his death. There could hardly be a more graphic manifestation of the evil woman capturing and destroying in the innocent man. In fact, in the late nineteenth century, the explicit equation of the mermaid’s lethal powers became identified merely with a woman emerging from the water: Herbert Draper, a Pre-Raphaelite follower working at the turn of the century, shows both traditional mermaids and human females in Ulysses and the Sirens (undated; Museum and Art Gallery, City of Kingston-Upon-Hull). By this time, the mermaid has become an overt and aggressive figure of seduction: Draper’s group is literally invading Ulysses’ ship rather than singing from a distance. The mermaid was a perfect vehicle for the late nineteenth century’s specter of the all-devouring female.

The Draper painting is a good reference point for Pyle’s subject and style in The Mermaid, because it leads back to the similarity in physical types between Pyle’s figures and some Pre-Raphaelite ones, raising the speculation that Pre-Raphaelitism, especially, of course, the works in the Bancroft collection, may have had some influence on Pyle. The extent of Pyle’s awareness of, and responsiveness to, Pre-Raphaelitism presents an all-too-typical art historical puzzle. That is, we lack direct evidence in a case where circumstantial evidence is very tempting. The only Pre-Raphaelite collection in the United States before World War I resided at Rockford, the Wilmington home of its collector Samuel Bancroft, who bought most of the works between 1890 and 1911. Pyle’s wife was a cousin of Bancroft. Bancroft’s collecting was unusual for Wilmington; though he was an active member of the community, he had no near rival as a collector of international rank, just as Pyle had none in his competence and fame as an artist. Friendship and interchange seem inevitable. On the other hand, Bancroft was extremely single-minded in his Pre-Raphaelite interests, as was Pyle in his devotion to book and magazine illustrating and to the concept of an American style for American artists. Aside from one passing reference to John Everett Millais’ The Blind Girl, and to the artists Rossetti and Ford Maddox Brown, Pyle made few recorded comments on the Pre-Raphaelites or any other artists. Around 1910, he did recognize his need to travel and study, and this resulted in a trip to Italy. Once there, he wrote that he had not realized the magnitude of the Old Masters’ greatness through the reproductions he had seen in America.

Ultimately, of course, The Mermaid must speak for itself. Conjecture about specific influence must yield to the visual evidence that the physical types and the mood of The Mermaid have a “family resemblance” to Pre-Raphaelitism if we take that movement at its broadest definition, as including elements of Romanticism and Symbolism. The character’s features are Pre-Raphaelite. The subject matter - the sea-seductress and a mortal male -appears very frequently in Pre-Raphaelite art, varying from Neo-Classical correctness (e.g. J.W. Waterhouse, Ulysses and the Sirens, 1891, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne) to vague suggestion (e.g. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, & A Sea Spell, 1877, Fogg Museum of Art). That is, the theme may be traditionally narrative or replete with personal, often hard to interpret, mysticism. Throughout his career, Pyle’s abiding interest was the narrative. All his works give sufficient visual clues for interpretation of plot even to a viewer who has not read the story being illustrated. And, even his fantasy characters inhabit a reassuringly “real” world. In The Mermaid, he chooses to leave his “plot” imprecise. He joins the camp of the poet Baudelaire (one of the first to recognize and praise Rossetti) who claimed the unspoken and the inexpressible as the supreme in art.

If Pyle were searching for renewed inspiration in 1909-1910, two works may have affected his choice of style and subject matter in The Mermaid. The 1909 issue of The Studio the most popular art periodical of the time and one which Pyle almost certainly read, published Rossetti’s chalk drawing Ligeia Siren, 1873 (whereabouts unknown). She is human at least to mid-thigh and wears flowing headgear associated with sirens/mermaids. Her face is typically late-Rossettian, similar to Pyle’s. However, she plucks her fatal lyre alone, without a male victim. The accompanying article refers to the siren’s “strange emotional beauty,” an apt phrase for Pyle’s painting as a whole. Another work, one which Pyle might have seen in reproduction, is extremely similar in composition but lacks the mysterious mood of The Mermaid: Pre-Raphaelite follower Frederick Leighton’s The Fisherman and the Siren (undated; City of Bristol Art Gallery), an illustration for Goethe’s poem of the same name, shows a fish-tailed mermaid overcoming an androgynous-looking young man as breakers crash on the rocks. He wears a cap, though of a different type from Pyle’s male figure, which evidently identifies him as a fisherman or, at least, a sea-going man.

The Mermaid is a beautiful and frustrating painting. It may well point to different stylistic and psychological directions cut short by the artist’s early death at the age of 58. More than any other work by Howard Pyle, it allows us to bring our own feelings - aesthetic and emotional - to it. Until further discoveries about its making and meaning become clear - and then, perhaps, in spite of them - our own responses are the best.