Circe Offering the Cup to Ulysses

1891

Oil on canvas, 148 × 92 cm · Gallery Oldham

Bought from Waterhouse in 1892 by the Oldham collector Charles Edward Lees, whose daughter gave it to the town’s gallery in 1952. Waterhouse puts the viewer in Ulysses’s place.

Circe raises a goblet of potion in one hand and her wand in the other.
The round mirror behind her shows Ulysses approaching, from where we stand.
A letter from Waterhouse to Lees survives in the gallery’s archive.

The enchantress Circe turned Odysseus’s men into pigs. Protected by an herb from Hermes, Odysseus resisted her drugs and made her restore them.

Image: Wikimedia Commons · Public domain