Focus on this artwork and explain the History.
In 1858 Leighton was represented on the Royal Academy walls by two pictures: The Fisherman and the Syren, and The County Paris, accompanied by Friar Lawrence, comes to the house of the Capulets to claim his bride, both small canvases painted in Rome and in Paris.The Fisherman and the Syren, which was painted for Signor Mario, the famous singer, initially received little friendly criticism, and the reception was generally lukewarm. However, a positive review appeared in The Daily Telegraph:The picture is not of any commanding size, nor does it relate any very exciting legend. The story is of the mystic Undine tinge, and with a shadowy semblance  in it to that strange legend, current among the peasants of Southern Russia, of the "white Lady" with the long hair, who, with loving and languishing gestures, decoys the unwary into her fantastic skiff, then, pressing her baleful lips to theirs, folds them to her fell embrace, and drags them shrieking beneath the engulphing waves. The "Fisherman and Syren" of Mr. Leighton has something of this unreal, legendary fatality pervading it throughout. There is irresistible seductiveness on the one side, pusillanimous fondness on the other. That it is all over with the Fisherman, and that the Syren will have her wicked will of him to his destruction, is palpable. But it is not alone for the admirable manner in which the story is told that we commend this picture. The drawing is eruditely correct, most graceful, and most symmetrical. The Syren is a model of form in its most charming undulations. The Fisherman is a type of manly elegance. That Mr. Leighton understands, to its remotest substructure, the vital principle of the line of beauty, is pleasurably manifest. But there is evidence here even more pleasing that the painter, in the gift of a glowing imagination, and a refined ideality, in his mastery of the nobler parts of pictorial manipulation, is worthy to be reckoned among the glorious brotherhood of disciples of the Italian masters—of the Grand Old Men whose pictures, faded and time-worn as they are, in the National Gallery hard by, laugh to scorn the futile fripperies that depend for half their sheen on gilt frames and copal varnish. This young artist is one of Lanzi's and Vasari's men. He has plainly drunk long and eagerly at the Painter's Castaly: the fount of  beauty and of grace that assuaged the thirst of those who painted the "Monna Lisa" and the "Belle Gardinière;" who modelled the "Horned Moses" and the "Slave;" who designed Peter's great Basilica, and the Ghiberti Gates at Florence.
The picture was shown again in the 1897 retrospective exhibition of Leighton's art. It was first entitled The Fisherman and Syren, and afterwards The Mermaid.
Ghiberti Gates Undine Belle Gardinière Castaly Lanzi Peter's great Basilica The Daily Telegraph Vasari Monna Lisa