Circe Invidiosa by Waterhouse: Jealousy Poured into Emerald Water (1892)
A dark-haired woman stands barefoot on the surface of a green sea, holding a wide, shallow bowl. From its rim a thin stream of bright poison falls straight down into the water, where it spreads in a glowing pool. Beneath her feet, half hidden in the waves, dark scaly coils are already beginning to move. This is Circe Invidiosa, "Circe the Envious", painted in 1892 by John William Waterhouse and now one of the best-loved paintings in the Art Gallery of South Australia in Adelaide. The picture below is our vintage poster version of the painting; the original is shown further down.
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Artist: John William Waterhouse (1849–1917)
Date: 1892, painted in London
Medium: Oil on canvas, 180.7 × 87.4 cm
Collection: Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide (acquired around 1902)
Source: Ovid, Metamorphoses, Book XIV
What is the story?
The episode comes from Book XIV of Ovid's Metamorphoses. The sea-god Glaucus is in love with the beautiful nymph Scylla, who rejects him. He goes to the enchantress Circe to ask for a love potion, but Circe falls in love with him herself. When Glaucus refuses her, she does not punish him. She turns on her rival instead. She brews a poison from evil herbs and pours it into the little cove where Scylla bathes. When Scylla wades in, her lower body turns into a ring of barking dogs, and she becomes the monster that sailors would later fear in the straits between Italy and Sicily.
What does the painting show?
Waterhouse chooses the moment of the crime itself. Circe stands above the water rather than in it, as if the sea holds her up, and she looks down into her bowl with complete concentration. Her dark green dress is patterned with peacock feathers and falls off one shoulder. The poison is the brightest thing in the picture: a single vertical line of acid green that links her hands to the sea.
Below the surface, the dark forms of the transformation are already taking shape, curling like the tail of a sea creature around her feet. Behind her rise brown rocks and the shadowy trunks of a wood. The whole canvas is built from deep greens, blue-greens and browns, so that the painting glows like stained glass or a jewel. Green is the colour of envy, and Waterhouse lets it poison everything in the frame.
The tall, narrow format, almost twice as high as it is wide, turns Circe into a column at the centre of the composition. There is no Scylla to be seen, no screaming and no struggle. The violence is all in what we know is about to happen.
Waterhouse and Circe
This was the second of three paintings Waterhouse devoted to the enchantress. A year earlier he had shown Circe Offering the Cup to Ulysses, where she faces the viewer on a throne, and in 1911 he returned to her in The Sorceress. The two early pictures make a pair: in one Circe tempts a hero, in the other she destroys a woman. Scholars have noted that Waterhouse leaves open whether she is a goddess or simply a woman driven by feeling, and he never paints her as a cartoon villain.
The same fascination with women who hold dangerous knowledge runs through his work, from The Magic Circle of 1886 to The Lady of Shalott. We have gathered these figures in our essay on Waterhouse's women who break the rule, and you can browse every Waterhouse painting we have explained.
Why is it in Adelaide?
The Art Gallery of South Australia already owned a Waterhouse, The Favourites of the Emperor Honorius, bought in 1883. Around 1902 it added Circe Invidiosa. The first reactions in Adelaide were mixed, but the picture has since become, in the gallery's own words, one of the most loved and copied works in its collection. It hangs in the Melrose Wing of International Art.
Hang John William Waterhouse’s Circe Invidiosa as a vintage art poster from the Sapiens Verbum print shop.
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Sources
Art Gallery of South Australia, Melrose Wing guide, "Circe Invidiosa"; Wikipedia, "Circe Invidiosa"; Ovid, Metamorphoses, Book XIV.
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