This gouache study shows a ship being drawn into a cove by the enchanted singing and playing of the sirens. On board a party of sailors look out, unaware that their ship will be wrecked and that they will be devoured by the magic power of the girls. The legend seems to have originated in Homer's odyssey, in which the Sirens lived on an island near Scylla, on the Straits of Messina between Sicily and the Italian mainland. Odysseus was warned by Circe of the power of the Sirens, and therefore had himself tied to the mast and his sailors ears blocked with wax. Orpheus, likewise, saved his crew by overpowering the Siren's song by himself playing the lyre. these two escapes led eventually to the death of the Sirens, as did their defeat in a singing contest with the Muses. however, according to mythology, many mortals were preyed upon by the Sirens, and met their deaths. Burne-Jones was fascinated by this legend, and for many years thought of how the theme might be treated as a painting. in 1872 he made a list of four subjects that he intended to work on, which included "the Sirens, small life-size", and with an attached note "these I desire to paint above all others" (Georgiana Burne-Jones) Memorials of Edward Burne-Jones, two volumes , London, 1904, p. 308). However, nearly twenty years later the scheme had not been carried out, as the artist described in a letter: "I am making a plan for a picture that will not be very big and will need to be very pretty. It is a sort of Siren-land - I don't know when or where - not Greek Sirens, but any Sirens, anywhere, that lure on men to destruction. There will be a shore full of them, looking out from rocks and crannies in the rocks at a boat full of armed men, and the time will be sunset. the men shall look at the women and the women at the men, but what happens afterwards is more than I care to tell" (ibid. II, p.222) A finished painting of this subject had been promised to Frederick Leyalnd. In about 1891 Burne-Jones wrote to him: "I want to show you the design, as far as i have gone, of the Sirens. It is very rough, only a scheme, but you can tell sufficiently, I think. I have made two. One is that little black invention almost literally enlarged, and the other is a variation upon it. As soon as we have settled which it shall be, or what changes would be better it, i should begin gathering studies together for it , and meantime i am having a ship made" (Ibid.). This last reference is to a model from which the artist might make drawings in different compositional arrangements. In the event, Leyland died soon after, and his commission to Burne-Jones remained unfulfilled. A related project was the design for a scheme of stained glass on the theme "The Voyage to Vinland the Good", which was commissioned to decorate a house at Newport in Rhode island, and which Burne-Jones completed in 1884. it seems likely that the present gouache is a larger and more highly worked trial for the scheme, rather and more highly worked trial sketch for the scheme, rather than either of the designs referred to above. A full-scale cartoon in coloured chalks, of a similar but not identical composition, is illustrated in Martin Harrison and Bill Waters, Burne-Jones, London, 1973, pl. 41. Unfinished oil versions of the subject are in the Ringling Museum, Sarasota, Florida (fig.1), and in the National Gallery of South Africa in Capetown. Burne-Jones continued to make drawings for the Sirens subject until shortly before his death, and the project was never completely abandoned. Sotheby's 28 November 2002