The author and publisher wish to thank the art galleries and museums named in the captions for permission to reproduce works held in their collections.

1. See e.g. on education Stray, C., Classics Transformed: Schools, Universities, and Society in England, 1830–1960 (Oxford 1998Google Scholar); Goldhill, S., Who Needs Greek? (Cambridge 2002), 178–246Google Scholar; on culture in general, Turner, Frank, The Greek Heritage in Victorian Britain (New Haven 1981Google Scholar); Jenkyns, R., The Victorians and Ancient Greece (Oxford 1980Google Scholar); Vance, Norman, The Victorians and Ancient Rome (Oxford 1997Google Scholar); Clarke, G.W. (ed.), Rediscovering Hellenism: The Hellenic Inheritance and the English Imagination (Cambridge 1989Google Scholar); on art, Jenkyns, R., Dignity and Decadence: Victorian Art and the Classical Inheritance (London 1991Google Scholar); on literature, Prins, Yopie, Victorian Sappho (Princeton 1999Google Scholar); Dowling, Linda, Hellenism and Homosexuality in Victorian Oxford (Ithaca 1994Google Scholar); Anderson, W., Matthew Arnold and the Classical Tradition (Ann Arbor 1965Google Scholar); on opera, S. Goldhill, op.cit., 108–78, and ‘Wagner’s Greeks: The Politics of Hellenism’, in Revermann, M. and Wilson, P. (eds.), Performance, Reception, Iconography: Studies in Honour of Oliver Taplin (Oxford 2008), 453–80Google Scholar—all with further bibliography.

2. See in particular Trippi, P., J.W. Waterhouse (London&New York 2002Google Scholar); Smith, A. (ed.), Exposed: The Victorian Nude (New York 2001Google Scholar), from both of which I have learned a great deal; and in general the works cited in n.21 below.

3. This linear engagement of text with text, as it were, has been most developed in Latin studies: see Martindale, C., Latin Poetry and the Hermeneutics of Reception (Cambridge 1993Google Scholar), and Latin Poetry and the Judgement of Taste (Cambridge 2005Google Scholar); Martindale, C. and Thomas, R. (eds.), Classics and the Uses of Reception (Oxford 2006CrossRefGoogle Scholar); Conte, G.B., The Rhetoric of Imitation: Genre and Poetic Memory in Virgil and Other Latin Poets, ed. Segal, C. (Ithaca 1986Google Scholar), and Genres and Readers, tr. Most, G. (Baltimore 1994Google Scholar); Hinds, Stephen, Allusion and Intertext: Dynamics of Appropriation in Roman Poetry (Cambridge 1998Google Scholar): I have learnt much from all of these books, and this article is in part an oblique critical engagement with this body of work. I have discussed Martindale’s work in particular in a forthcoming paper, ‘Cultural History and Aesthetics: Why Kant is no Place to Start Reception Studies’, in Hall, Edith (ed.), Theorising Performance (Oxford, forthcomingGoogle Scholar), stemming from a conference where I benefited from discussion with Charles Martindale and Edith Hall. Martindale, ‘Thinking Through Reception’, in Martindale and Thomas, op. cit., 1–13, accuses me of wanting to ‘collapse reception into cultural studies’ (9). I would not use the negative term ‘collapse’, but otherwise I happily accept the charge of moving away from the limited and Kant–led aesthetics of one branch of reception studies towards a model more sensitive to the role of cultural history in the process of reception.

4. St Eulalia of Merida, martyred naked (but covered in snow) on December 10th 304, is often and easily confused with St Eulalia of Barcelona martyred naked (but covered in snow) on February 12th 304: and many, naturally enough, assume that there is only one figure behind both sets of stories, especially when the most famous celebration of St Eulalia of Barcelona, a poem by Quiricus, seventh–century Bishop of Barcelona, is in fact a version of Prudentius’ poem on the other St Eulalia. There are some fine reliefs in Barcelona cathedral by Bartolemé Ordonez (1519) which show the fully naked Eulalia (of Barcelona) on a fire, and a painted altar piece in the cathedral of Palma de Mallorca (c. 1350) which has small pictures of a half–naked Eulalia as well as a large central fully dressed image of the saint. The Catholic Church insists that there are two different figures, and since Waterhouse refers us directly to Prudentius, I will assume that he is referring to Eulalia of Merida only. It is possible that his iconography is influenced by the older, naked forms from Barcelona Cathedral or the cathedral of Palma de Mallorca, though there is no evidence he ever saw them.

5. The catalogue entry reads only: ‘Prudentius says that the body of St Eulalia was shrouded “by a miraculous fall of snow when lying exposed in the forum after martyrdom”.’ It is at least possible, though no contemporary commentator makes such a connection, that some viewers may have recalled the story of Eulalia from Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, where in chapter 2 we read: ‘Eulalia, a Spanish lady of a Christian family, was remarkable in her youth for sweetness of temper, and solidity of understanding seldom found in the capriciousness of juvenile years. Being apprehended as a Christian, the magistrate attempted by the mildest means, to bring her over to paganism, but she ridiculed the pagan deities with such asperity, that the judge, incensed at her behaviour, ordered her to be tortured. Her sides were accordingly torn by hooks, and her breasts burnt in the most shocking manner, until she expired by the violence of the flames, December, A.D. 303.’

6. In general, see Roberts, M., Poetry and the Cult of the Martyrs (Ann Arbor 1993Google Scholar); Malamud, M., A Poetics of Transformation: Prudentius and Classical Mythology (Ithaca 1989Google Scholar); Shaw, B., ‘Body/Power/Identity: Passions of the Martyrs’, JECS 4 (1996), 269–312Google Scholar; Perkins, J., The Suffering Self (London& New York 1995CrossRefGoogle Scholar); for the writing on the body with Eulalia, see Goldhill, S., ‘Body/Politics: Is There a History of Reading?’, in Falkner, T., Felson, N. and Konstan, D. (eds.), Contextualizing Classics: Ideology, Performance, Dialogue (Lanham 1999), 89–120Google Scholar.

7. Perhaps an echo in technique of Caravaggio’s extraordinary ‘The Conversion of St Paul on the Road to Damascus’.

8. See Hobson, A., The Art and Life ofJ.W. Waterhouse RA (London 1980Google Scholar); Trippi (n.2 above); Lys Baldry, A., ‘The Late J.W. Waterhouse’, The, Studio (June 1917), 2–15Google Scholar. It is striking how little Waterhouse appears in the public and private records of the period, despite his eminence as an artist—especially in contrast with figures such as Poynter, Alma-Tadema or Leighton.

9. See Trippi (n.2 above), 138f. The catalogue quoted a condensed stanza from Tennyson’s ‘Palace of Art’. This picture was very widely praised in contemporary criticism.

10. The Art Journal (1893), 125.

11. The Magazine of Art 8 (1885), 390.

12. The Art Journal (1893), 125.

13. See Blaikie, J., ‘J.W. Waterhouse A.R.A.’, The Magazine of Art 9 (1886), 1–6Google Scholar.

14. Trippi (n.2 above), 66; Kestner, J.Mythology and Misogyny: The Social Discourse of British Classical Subject Painting (Madison 1989Google Scholar). See also Casteras, S., Images of Victorian Womanhood in English Art (Rutherford/Madison/Teaneck/London/Toronto 1987Google Scholar); Psomiades, K., Beauty’s Body: Femininity and Representation in British Aestheticism (Stanford 1997Google Scholar).

15. A huge bibliography could be given. Starting points: Jay, E., Faith and Doubt in Victorian Britain (London 1986CrossRefGoogle Scholar); Helmstadter, R. and Lightman, B. (eds.), Victorian Faith in Crisis (London 1990CrossRefGoogle Scholar); Snell, K. and Ell, P., Rival Jerusalems: The Geography of Victorian Religion (Cambridge 2000CrossRefGoogle Scholar).

16. See e.g. Dowling (n.1 above); Prins (n.1 above); Dellamora, Richard, Masculine Desire: The Sexual Politics of Victorian Aestheticism (Chapel Hill 1990Google Scholar); Morrison, J., Winckelmann and the Notion of Aesthetic Education (Oxford 1996CrossRefGoogle Scholar); Potts, A., Flesh and the Ideal: Winckelmann and the Origins of Art History (New Haven 1994Google Scholar).

17. See e.g. Vance (n.1 above); and, with wider historical frame, Edwards, C. (ed.), Roman Presences: Receptions of Rome in European Culture, 1789–1945 (Cambridge 1999Google Scholar).

18. 1 have been unable to trace an image of either painting, but from the subjects and the artists’ other work it is extremely unlikely that these paintings were other than genre pieces.

19. Kingsley, C., Hypatia or New Foes with an Old Face (London 1853), ch 29Google Scholar. Hypatia, interestingly, is the name chosen by Charles Bradlaugh for his daughter (and future biographist, Bonner, Hypatia Bradlaugh: Charles Bradlaugh: A Record of His life and Work [London, 1902]Google Scholar). Bradlaugh, a leading and indeed notorious freethinker, was the defendant with Mrs Besant in the famous Knowlton case, which tested the limits of the 1865 legal definition of obscenity by publishing a physiological text book including details of birth control (see for discussion and background Dawson, Gowan, Darwin, Literature and Victorian Respectability [Cambridge 2007], esp. 122–61Google Scholar); and also the first atheist to be elected to Parliament, where his inability and unwillingness to take the oath on admission caused a constitutional crisis: see Arnstein, W., The Bradlaugh Case: A Study in Late Victorian Opinion and Politics (Oxford 1965Google Scholar). Hypatia, the pagan philosopher destroyed by the violence of Christianity, is unlikely to have been chosen lightly as a name by such a figure. Also, however, Bradlaugh was thrown out of his house at age 16 for his views, and was taken in by the widow of Richard Carlisle, a freethinker, who had a daughter Hypatia, with whom Bradlaugh fell in love—and there was some gossipy scandal about the relationship: see Hypatia Bradlaugh Bonner, op. cit., 19—and no doubt his first love, also the child of a freethinking family, was in his mind when he named his daughter. The name Hypatia may be associated in this period with opposition to certain religious institutions (Kingsley) or even religion itself (Bradlaugh).

20. Smith (n.2 above), 229.

21. See Smith, A.The Victorian Nude: Sexuality, Morality and Art (Manchester 1996Google Scholar); also ‘Nature Transformed: Leighton, the Nude and the Model’, in Barringer, T. and Prettejohn, E. (eds.), Frederick Leighton: Antiquity, Renaissance, Modernity (New Haven 1999), 19–48Google Scholar, and ‘“The British Matron ” and the Body Beautiful’, in Prettejohn, E. (ed.), After the Pre–Raphaelites: Art and Aestheticism in Victorian Britain (Manchester 1999), 217–39Google Scholar; more generally, Pointon, M., Naked Authority (Cambridge 1990Google Scholar); Nead, L., The Female Nude: Art, Obscenity and Sexuality (London& New York 1992CrossRefGoogle Scholar); Bullen, J., The Pre–Raphaelite Body (Oxford 1998Google Scholar); Pollock, G., Vision and Difference (London 1988Google Scholar).

22. Interestingly, Poynter himself wrote (The Times [May 28 1885], 4): ‘It is obvious, too, that there is no room for drapery in this particular subject; if done at all it should be like the statue [the Esquiline Venus, as discussed below]; the forced introduction of drapery would be a prudery which would increase the evil, if evil there is.’ It is hard to relate this comment to the two paintings without suggesting that (for whatever reason) Poynter was not consistent in this matter.

23. The responses to this picture are particularly well discussed in Smith (n.21 above ‘Nature’), 202–07. The connection between Poynter’s picture and Alma–Tadema’s is made explicit by Poynter (n.22 above), 4.

24. Poynter (n.22 above), 4.

25. The Times (May 20 1885), 10.

26. On this figure in general see the fine study of Smith (n.21 above ‘British Matron’).

27. Well discussed with extensive bibliography by Walkowitz, J., Prostitution and Victorian Society: Women, Class and the State (Cambridge 1980CrossRefGoogle Scholar).

28. The Times (May 23 1885), 10.

29. The Times (May 21 1885), 6.

30. H., , The Times (May 25 1885), 10Google Scholar; Taylor, H.G.F., The Times (May 25 1885), 10Google Scholar.

31. The Times (May 23 1885), 10.

32. The Times (May 23 1885), 10.

33. Brett, John, The Times (May 25 1885), 10Google Scholar.

34. The Times (May 23 1885), 10.

35. H. (n.30 above), 10. He adds two other criteria, an ‘ideal presentation’, and ‘the observance of certain special artistic conventions as old as Praxiteles’, a phrase which, he and others indicate, means concealing the genitals themselves with cloth or plants in paintings, a convention that, as several writers noted, was no longer adequately observed in France (ever the derided other in this debate).

36. See Homer, William, Thomas Eakins: His Life and Work (New York/London/Paris 1992), esp. 173–94Google Scholar; Bolger, D. and Cash, S. (eds.), Thomas Eakins and the Swimming Picture (Fort Worth 1996Google Scholar); and more generally Fried, M., Realism, Writing and Disfiguration: Thomas Eakins and Stephen Crane (Chicago 1988Google Scholar).

37. Elizabeth was a popular saint, used in children’s moral literature (see McEvansoneya, P., ‘“A Libel in Paint ”: Religious and Artistic Controversy around P.H. Calderon’s “The Renunciation of St. Elizabeth of Hungary”’, Journal of Victorian Culture 1 [1996], 254–56CrossRefGoogle Scholar), and better known from Ambrose de Lisle Phillips’s translation of Comte de Montalembert’s history, The Chronicle of the Life of St Elizabeth (London 1839Google Scholar). de Lisle Phillips’s son, Edwin de Lisle, spoke out in Parliament against Calderon’s picture, calling it ‘nothing short of obscene and blasphemous and ridiculous’ (Hansard 354 [June 18 1891], col. 798Google Scholar). Liszt’s oratorio on Elizabeth was performed in London in 1865 and well–received.

38. James Collinson (a self–flagellating Christian artist) had already painted a ‘Renunciation of Queen Elizabeth of Hungary’ (now in the Johannesburg Municipal Gallery)—a restrained image of the fully clothed queen laying aside her crown; and D.G. Rossetti had made three drawings, including one of her naked, kneeling by an altar (Birmingham City Art Gallery 375 ’04). But there is no reason to assume that Calderon had seen any of these. See Grieve, A., ‘A Notice on Illustrations to Charles Kingsley’s The Saint’s Tragedy by three Pre–Raphaelite Artists’, The Burlington Magazine 111 (1969),291–93Google Scholar.

39. Smith (n.21 above Victorian Nude). The fullest discussion is in McEvansoneya (n.37 above), 254–79.

40. Smith (n.20 above), 234; Clarke’s comments, quoted in Smith, are taken from The Times May 16 and 25 1891.

41. The Times (June 10 1891), 8—the President of the Royal Academy gracefully but firmly rejected the request in a reply immediately below the Duke’s letter.

42. The Times (May 20 1891), 13. For a fine discussion of the accusations of immorality levelled at Darwin and others, see Dawson (n.19 above), 202f., who puts Huxley’s letter in a broader context. Dowling (n.l above), 32–66, puts this anti-catholic feeling into a useful context of rows over sexual abstinence and marital norms (45): ‘virulent and widespread…anti’-catholic feeling…involved far more than religious prejudice.’ See in general Arnstein, W., Protestant versus Catholic in Mid–Victorian England: Mr Newdegate and the Nuns (Columbia& London 1982Google Scholar).

43. The Times (May 25 1891), 8.

44. Pall Mall Gazette (May 16 1891), 1. This is explicitly the explanation for Calderon’s picture. The Athenaeum (3003, May 16 1885), 637, already had worried about his ‘Andromeda’ that ‘the fair, plump princess is not as Greek as we could wish…rather modern than statuesque’.

45. Punch (May 9 1891), 227; see also Fun (May 13 1891), 196, for the same joke. Both are discussed and reproduced helpfully in McEvansoneya (n.37 above).

46. The Times (July 18 1891), 11. See Hansard 355 col. 1522. It is important to note the indications of laughter, which The Times includes, to judge the tone of this speech accurately.

47. See Arnstein (n.42 above), on Murphy 88–107; on convents 62–73 and 108–22.

48. See Arnstein (n.42 above), 130f., who notes that The Times declared that this revelation of ‘diabolical events’ in Austro–Hungary—Elizabeth’s kingdom, of course—would ‘tend to confirm the repulsion with which Protestants regard these institutions’.

49. See Casteras, Susan, ‘Virgin Vows: The Early Victorian Artists’ Portrayal of Nuns and Novices’, Victorian Studies 24 (1981), 157–84Google Scholar. John Nicholas Murphy in his lengthy apologia for convents, Terra Incognita: The Convents of the United Kingdom (London 1873), 2fGoogle Scholar., describes visiting the Royal Academy in 1868, where he witnessed the beautiful wife of an Anglican clergyman view the painting ‘Not a Whit Too Soon’, a painting which represented a young nun being saved from the clutches of catholic clergy by a knight in shining armour, and heard her exclaim loudly ‘Oh, how dreadful! Why are such things tolerated? Can’t the government interfere?’. As he left the gallery, he adds, he saw a boy selling cheap copies of Revelations of a Convent, or the Story of Sister Lucy, a book of lurid falsehoods. But Harriet Martineau (for example) also wrote a seven-part story, ‘Sister Anna’s Probation’, serialised in Once a Week 1861–62, where Anna is saved from an unnatural life as a nun by her lover. Punch, paradigmatically, images an avaricious and sinister monk luring a rich, young and doll–like girl into a convent (Punch 20 [1851], 129). For the previous decade, and worries about connections between the Pre-Raphaelites and the Oxford Movement, see Cooper, Robyn, ‘The Relationship between the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and Painters before Raphael in English Criticism of the 1840s and 1850s’, Victorian Studies 24 (1981), 405–38Google Scholar.

50. The Art Journal (1849), 167.

51. The Times (April 25 1885), 10, noted Hypatia’s ‘slender form’—and the inspiration of Kingsley. The Illustrated London News (16 May 1891), 648Google Scholar, commented on the portrayal of Elizabeth of Hungary that Calderon ‘can scarcely wish us to believe that the frail girl whom he depicts had been the mother of several children’. A close evaluation of the fleshiness of the naked females is encouraged (pruriently?) by such comments.

52. Pall Mall Gazette July 6 1885; and then on July 7, 8, 9, with comments and discussion almost every day until August 26.

53. Bristow, E., Vice and Vigilance: Purity Movements in Britain since 1700 (Dublin 1977), 118–21Google Scholar; Walkowitz (n.27 above), 248–52.

54. The sale (Christie’s, February 19 2003) was to an anonymous bidder, but was widely rumoured to be John Schaeffer, an Australian business tycoon. Much of his collection appeared on the market when he was divorced in 2004, but the current location of ‘Mariamne’ is not easy to trace.

56. Hebbel, F., Herodes und Mariamne, ed. Purdie, E. (Oxford 1987Google Scholar); Pordage, S., Herod and Mariamne: A Tragedy (London 1673Google Scholar).

57. The catalogue entry reads: ‘Mariamne, wife of King Herod the Great, going forth to execution, after her trial for a false charge brought against her by the jealousy of Salome, the King’s sister, his mother, and others of his family. After Mariamne’s trial and condemnation by the judges appointed by her husband, Herod, who had been passionately attached to his wife, was about to commute the sentence to imprisonment for life, but was urged by Salome to have the sentence carried out, which was accordingly done—see Josephus.’ Cf the catalogue entry for Calderon’s picture of Elizabeth, which briefly tells the story of the saint and adds ’See Dietrich’s “Life of Elizabeth”“.

58. Trippi (n.2 above), 80 and 82.

59. Trippi (n.2 above), 82, lists comments from Bernard Shaw, Harry Quilter and D.S. MacColl on the theatricality of the image.

60. Trippi (n.2 above), 82.

61. Based on the bibliographies collected by Schreckenberg, H. in Bibliographie zu Flavius Josephus (Leiden 1968Google Scholar) and Bibliographie zu Flavius Josephus Supplementband (Leiden 1979Google Scholar), it is fascinating to note that while over 600 articles were written on Josephus between 1801 and 1901 only 46 were in the English language. Josephus was simply not a major concern of the intellectual or scholarly world in England or America. Of these 46, the majority (27) are in theological journals and concern specific religious matters, and 10 others are on local questions of archaeology. In the same 100 years, however, over 200 separate editions of Whiston’s translation of Josephus were published, including over 50 in London alone (and e.g. 26 in Philadelphia)—excluding 33 undated editions. Clearly, very many copies of Josephus in translation were in circulation. I intend to discuss the Victorian reception of Josephus in more detail elsewhere, but these figures immediately indicate how carefully ‘the educated audience’ needs to be calibrated. I suspect that many more clergy (and others) owned copies of Josephus for reference and/or status, rather than reading Josephus through.

62. ‘Mr Waterhouse, whose few pictures have made their mark, is fond of antiquity, but goes to something else than ordinary classical sources’, noted The Times (April 30 1887), 10.

63. Hinds (n.3 above), 31: the emphasis on ‘entire’ is mine.

64. His ‘Lady Of Shalott’ is perhaps more instantly recognisable to scholars as it has been so popular for book covers and as an illustration of Tennyson’s poem.

65. See Auerbach, N., Women and the Demon: Life of a Victorian Myth (Cambridge MA 1982Google Scholar); Dijkstra, B., Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin–de–Siècle Culture (Oxford 1986Google Scholar).

66. See, for a general if rather rosy placement of Beardsley in Victorian culture, Zatlin, Linda, Aubrey Beardsley and Victorian Sexual Politics (Oxford 1990Google Scholar).

67. See Laqueur, T., Solitary Sex: A Cultural History of Masturbation (New York 2003), esp. 192–239Google Scholar.

68. Acton, William, The Functions and Disorders of the Reproductive Organs (London 1857), 133Google Scholar: ‘I admit, of course, the existence of sexual excitement terminating even in nymphomania, a form of insanity that those accustomed to visit lunatic asylums must be fully conversant with.’ Nymphomania is the threatening extreme that helps authorise his well-known normative assertion that ‘there can be no doubt that sexual feeling in the female is in the majority of cases in abeyance’. So in the Westminster Review (1850), 456Google Scholar, it is declared that ‘Women’s desires scarcely ever lead to their fall’—that is, women very rarely become prostitutes/are seduced out of sexual feelings, although—and here’s how the patriarchal system holds together, even in a critical piece such as this—after they have experienced sex, then their dormant desires may take over. On Acton and the context of male anxiety see e.g. Hall, L., Hidden Anxieties: Male Sexuality 1900–1950 (Cambridge 1991Google Scholar); Haller, J. and Haller, R., The Physician and Sexuality in Victorian America (New York 1974Google Scholar); Weeks, Jeffrey, Sex, Politics and Society: the Regulation of Sexuality since 1800 (London 1981Google Scholar); Peterson, J., ‘Dr Acton’s Enemy: Medicine, Sex and Society’, Victorian Studies 29 (1986), 569–90Google ScholarPubMed; Sigsworth, E.M. and Wyke, T.J., ‘A Study of Victorian Prostitution and Venereal Disease’, in Vicinus, M. (ed.), Suffer and Be Still (Bloomington 1972), 77–99Google Scholar; Nead, L., Myths of Sexuality: Representations of Women in Victorian Britain (Oxford 1988Google Scholar); Walkowitz (n.27 above): each of which is corrective to and indebted to the seminal work of Marcus, Stephen, The Other Victorians (New York 1964Google Scholar).

69. ‘At this point a certain suspicion of mine became a certainty. The use of “Bahnhof’ [ “station ”; literally, “railway-court”] and “Friedhof’ [ “cemetery”; literally, “peace–court ”] to represent the female genitals was striking enough in itself, but it also served to direct my awakened curiosity to the similarly formed “Vorhof” [“vestibulum”; literally, “fore-court”]—an anatomical term for a particular region of the female genitals. This might have been no more than mistaken ingenuity. But now, with the addition of “nymphs” visible in the background of a “thick wood”, no further doubts could be entertained. Here was a symbolic geography of sex! “Nymphae”, as is known to physicians though not to laymen (and even by the former the term is not very commonly used), is the name given to the labia minora, which lie in the background of the “thick wood ” of the pubic hair. But any one who employed such technical names as “vestibulum” and “nymphae” must have derived his knowledge from books, and not from popular ones either, but from anatomical textbooks or from an encyclopaedia—the common refuge of youth when it is devoured by sexual curiosity. If this interpretation were correct, therefore, there lay concealed behind the first situation in the dream a phantasy of defloration, the phantasy of a man seeking to force an entrance into the female genitals.’ S. Freud, ‘Fragment from the analysis of a case of hysteria’, S.E. 7.99. In fact, the use of ‘nymphae’ in English may not be as restricted as Freud suggests: A. Smith writing to Darwin (March 26 1867, DAR 85: A103-A105) talks of the ‘lengthened nymphae’ of Hottentot women; Waitz, Theodor, Introduction to Anthropology, tr. Collingwood, J.F. (London 1863), 106Google Scholar, also talks of Hottentot ‘nymphae’ as a distinctive anatomical feature. Smith was a retired army surgeon and writing privately to a biologist, but Waitz, although he was interested in ‘psychophysiology’, was writing for a general audience.

70. Groneman, Carol, Nymphomania: A History (New York 2000Google Scholar); Rousseau, G.S., ‘Nymphomania, Bienville, and the Rise of Erotic Sensibility’, in Boucé, P. (ed.), Sexuality in Eighteenth–Century Britain (Manchester 1982), 95–119Google Scholar; on the ancient world, see Maaskant–Kleibink, M., ‘Nymphomania’, in Blok, J. and Mason, P. (eds.), Sexual Asymmetry (Amsterdam 1980), 275–89Google Scholar; and, more generally, Dean–Jones, L. ‘The Politics of Pleasure: Female Sexual Appetite in the Hip–pocratic Corpus’, Helios 19 (1992), 74–78Google Scholar.

71. For a modern version of such a view, see Wood, Christopher, The Pre–Raphaelites (London 1981Google Scholar), who writes (144): ‘Waterhouse’s Circes and Sirens are not evil and destructive monsters like those of Gustave Moreau and the European Symbolists. Rather they lure and entrap their victims by their wistful beauty and mysterious sadness, as if they cannot help what they are doing, and rather regret it.’

72. ‘Mr J.W. Waterhouse’s Painting “Hylas and the Nymphs”’, The Studio 10 (1897), 243–47Google Scholar; quotations are from 244 and 247.

73. Phythian, J., Handbook of Painting (Manchester 1905), 54Google Scholar. The threat of realism was precisely articulated in the debate in The Times in 1885 over the Royal Academy’s exhibition and its paintings of nude women: ‘Why, my dear “goody” and my dear young lady, if painters were photographers neither you nor any decent man or woman could stay in Burlington House ten minutes’ (The Times [May 25 1885], 10Google Scholar). To look at a photograph of a naked person is self–evidently unacceptable because of its realism.

74. Kestner (n.14 above).

75. Spielmann, M.H., ‘The British Art Section’, in Dumas, F.G. (ed.), Franco–British Exhibition Illustrated Review: British Fine Art Section (London 1908), 7Google Scholar; The Art Journal (June 1897), 178; Baldry, J., The Studio 10 (1897), 243–47Google Scholar.

76. Sketchley, R., ‘J.D. Waterhouse R.A.’, Art Annual: The Art Journal Christmas Number (London 1909), 8Google Scholar.

77. The central image of the piece is also taken from classical sources—the Minotaur and the labyrinth—though, unlike in the classical myth, where both boys and girls were offered in tribute, in Stead’s report the victims are all female. Campaigners for purity were as attracted by the language of the classical world as were the artists they campaigned against.

78. Acton, William, Prostitution, ed. Fryer, P. (London 1968 [orig. London 1857]), 23Google Scholar.

79. John Ruskin, Works 17, 213f.

80. As You Like It 2.1.12–14.

81. Trippi(n.2 above), 110.

82. Kestner (n.14 above), 232, thinks that Odysseus is in the painting, presumably the most emphatic male figure, but there is no evidence for this. (He repeats the same assertion in Masculinities in Victorian Painting [Aldershot 1995], 61f.Google Scholar)

83. Armstrong, W., ‘Briton Riviere: His Life and Work’, The Art Journal (1891), 1–32Google Scholar. Kestner (n.14 above), 42, usefully lists 20 British Circes between 1884 and 1912.

84. See Harrison, Jane,“The Myth of Odysseus and the Sirens’, The Magazine of Art 10 (1887), 133–36Google Scholar, which illustrates ancient Sirens in the form Waterhouse paints. The Pall Mall Gazette (May 2 1891), 2, notes, ‘Some hypercritical spectators have asked how the Sirens managed to “do” their black hair, as they are furnished only with claws’, a joke they repeated May 22, 2.

85. Ruskin (n.79 above), 21 If.

86. Baldry (n.8 above), 2–15.

87. Kestner (n.14 above), 14.

88. I wish to express my heartfelt thanks to Liz Prettejohn for help with this piece, and to the fellow members of the Cambridge Victorian Studies Group, where the paper was discussed.