OdysseusCirce1.0094

John William Waterhouse, "Circe Invidiosa", 1892, oil on canvas, Adelaide, Art Gallery of South Australia, accession number 0.106

Image at right is acquired from Google Arts.

Joseph A. Kestner argues at length, in his book Myth and Misogyny: the social discourse of nineteenth-century British classical-subject painting (U Wisconsin Press, 1989), that like many other Victorian painters (e.g. Collier in his Clytemnestra paintings), Waterhouse was somewhat gripped by fear of the female. "In the 1890s, Waterhouse turned to classical-subject painting to express gynophobic attitudes. From this point to the end of his career, his canvases are analyses of the femme fatale, and frequently a special type of this icon, the jeune fille fatale. ... During the early 1890s Waterhouse was particularly concerned with the figure of Circe, which he painted in successive years, Circe Offering the Cup to Ulysses (1891) and Circe Invidiosa. ... [Here] Waterhouse depicts the goddess pouring a green poison into the sea to destroy Scylla, a rival for the love of Glaucus. By portraying the evident self-posession and determination of the goddess, Waterhouse has used Homeric and Ovidian sources of the story of Circe in an incisive misogynistic manner."