Lamia

John William Waterhouse’s Lamia coils in that peculiar space between seduction and dread, where the Pre-Raphaelite fascination with mythic femininity takes a darker turn. The serpent-woman—half languid beauty, half creeping horror—exists in a twilight of gilt-edged decadence, the kind of painting that would feel at home in a dimly lit Victorian parlor thick with the scent of opium and wilted roses. Waterhouse, as usual, isn’t just painting a scene; he’s staging a tension, that uneasy pull between the viewer’s desire to look and the instinct to recoil. You can almost hear the rustle of scales against fabric, the whisper of something irrevocably wrong beneath the surface beauty.
The work slots neatly into Waterhouse’s broader obsession with doomed enchantresses—those women who are both agents and victims of their own mythologies. Think of Circe Offering the Cup to Ulysses or Hylas and the Nymphs, where allure is a trap waiting to spring. But Lamia feels different, more intimate in its menace. There’s no heroic counterpoint here, no Odysseus or Hylas to offset her power; the viewer stands alone, implicated. The geography of the painting is deliberately vague, a dreamscape of muted greens and golds that could be anywhere or nowhere, which only heightens the sense of being caught in a private nightmare. And yet, for all its darkness, the painting thrums with a weird vitality—Lamia herself seems almost weary of her own myth, as if she’s as trapped by the story as anyone who gazes upon her.
What lingers isn’t just the image but the question it leaves hanging: how much of this is horror, and how much is empathy? Waterhouse doesn’t answer. He lets the serpent’s tail glint faintly in the shadows, a reminder that some stories don’t end—they just coil tighter.