Because most fish aim to spend their entire lives underwater, where few artists go to paint, fish are seldom seen in paintings. That contrasts with those who try to capture fish by going fishing, an activity I have previously covered in this series in this article and a second.

Most of the aquatic creatures seen in paintings of myths, including those accompanying the god Neptune, appear to be caricatures of marine mammals including dolphins, or sea-monsters bearing no resemblance to fish.

One exception to this is Joseph Stella’s The Birth of Venus from 1922. As might be expected, his treatment is completely novel and seems to have benefited from visits to an aquarium. Aphrodite is shown at sea, in the upper part of the painting her upper body above the waterline, and below morphing into an aquatic plant underneath, where it finally merges into a helical shell. Matching the birds and flowers above the water are brightly coloured fish below.

Another interesting exception is Joachim Beuckelaer’s depiction of water in his Four Elements cycle from 1569. This shows A Fish Market with the Miraculous Draught of Fishes in the Background, the one place even landlubbers would come across fish, combined with the Gospel story in the far distance.

In the summer of 1872, as a one-off, Gustave Courbet painted an allegorical still life of The Trout, that is “hooked and bleeding from the gills”, a powerful expression of his personal feelings after being imprisoned for damage to the Vendôme Column during the Paris Commune the previous year.

JMW Turner recruits a school of fish for effect in his Slave Ship from 1840. His threatening sky and violent sea put the ship in the middle distance, silhouetted against the blood-red sky. The foreground is filled with the ghastly evidence of the slaves who were cast overboard.

Seen in amongst a feeding frenzy of fish and scavenging seabirds are hands raised from the waves in their final plea for rescue, a gruesome manacled leg, and various shackles used to restrain the slaves when in transit. Further back on the left a vague white form could represent spirits, and on the right is the thrashing tail of a sea monster.

Fish make the occasional appearance alongside legendary mermaids, as in Hans Thoma’s Three Mermaids from 1879. These mermaids are remarkably human in form, lacking fishtails, and frolic with fish under the light of the moon.

Historically the most important fish in Europe has been the humble herring. In the Middle Ages herring fisheries prospered and were the foundation of Copenhagen and Great Yarmouth, and influential in early Amsterdam. They remain strongly associated with the Netherlands and Nordic countries, where they are commonly preserved in brine (soused) or pickled.

Gabriel Metsu’s Woman Selling Herring (c 1661-62) is going from door to door with her fish, here trying to convince an old woman standing with a stick at the door of her dilapidated cottage in the Dutch Republic.

In Hans Andersen Brendekilde’s Home for Dinner from 1917, a young girl holding some fresh fish stands talking to a man with a spade.

JMW Turner toured the West Country as far as Cornwall in 1811, and the Tate Gallery has his ninety-page sketchbook recording many views of the Cornish coast from that visit. He later developed several into fine oil paintings, although it’s unclear whether this watercolour of St. Mawes, Cornwall, from about 1823, had its origins in those sketches and studies.

As with his paintings of other coastal areas, Turner shows a fishing boat coming in to a beach to land its catch, and the great activity in the open air fish market in the foreground. Behind are typical Cornish cottages stepped up from the shore to the top of the coastal cliffs, and the castles of St Mawes (closer) and Pendennis, in Falmouth (more distant, on the other side of this estuary).

Richard Dadd’s Fish Market by the Sea, from about 1860, shows an impromptu open-air fish market, run by the fishermen’s wives, to sell their husband’s catch as soon as it had been landed.

Sirens are mythical woman-like creatures with alluring voices, best-known from their appearance in Homer’s Odyssey, but also featuring in other tales including that of Jason and the Argonauts. Typically their singing lures sailors to their death, and that reputation has led them to represent anything that’s dangerously attractive. Originally they weren’t described in any physical detail, but visual representations soon envisaged them as having the upper bodies of beautiful young women, and the lower bodies and legs of birds, and that has been incorporated and elaborated in later accounts and retelling.

At the end of the year that Odysseus and his crew stayed with the sorceress Circe, she helpfully advised him that he would have to sail past the sirens, two to five creatures who lured men to their death with their singing. In preparation, Odysseus got his sailors to plug their ears with beeswax before they reached the sirens, so they couldn’t hear their song, and to bind him to the mast. He gave them strict instructions that under no circumstances, no matter what he said at the time, were they to loosen his bonds, as he would be listening to the sirens’ song.

As the group reached the sirens, Odysseus told his men to release him, but instead they bound him even more closely to the mast. Once they had passed safely from earshot of the sirens, Odysseus used his facial expression to inform his men, who then released him, and they sailed on.

William Etty’s The Sirens and Ulysses from about 1837 is one of the pioneering accounts in paint of this story from the Odyssey. His three naked sirens are all woman, one playing a lyre, another holding double pipes aloft, all three doing their best to draw the sailors from Odysseus’ ship to a shore where there are the remains of earlier victims.

Edward Poynter’s The Siren from about 1864 has Aesthetic overtones in the lyre she is playing.

Arnold Böcklin takes an unusual approach of almost dereferencing Odysseus in his painting of Sirens from 1875, although there is an approaching vessel that could be his. The two sirens filling the canvas are very human down to the waist, below which they resemble birds. One sits facing us, clearly in full voice, and highly alluring in looks. The other, her back towards us, is playing an aulos and looks rather obese, to the point of almost being comical, her right breast laid upon a flat-topped rock. At their feet are three human skulls and other bones to indicate their graver intentions.

Gustave Moreau’s The Sirens (1882) shows them as beautiful figures in a static scene, with a saturnine setting sun. There is, though, a lone sail on the horizon that hasn’t yet attracted their attention. Their lower legs turn into the writhing coils of sea serpents.

Moreau’s slightly later group portrait of The Sirens from about 1885 is more complete, with Odysseus sailing past, but its three figures are clearly all woman and no bird.

Eight Dancing Women with Bird Bodies (1886) is one of Hans Thoma’s unusual mythological paintings. The best-known women with bird bodies were the sirens, who range in number from two to five. In another painting showing the sirens trying to lure a passing ship, Thoma paints similar figures, suggesting these are intended to be sirens.

John William Waterhouse’s Ulysses and the Sirens (1891) is closer to the Homeric account, although he provides a total of seven sirens, shown as large eagle-like birds of prey with only the head and neck of beautiful women. He has added bandage wrappings around the head of each sailor to make it clear that their ears are stopped from hearing sound, a visual device that links neatly with the text. His sirens are clearly singing, particularly the one closest to the viewer, who is challenging the hearing protection of one of the sailors. Another sailor, at the stern of the ship (left of the painting), is seen clutching his ears.

Almost a decade later, Waterhouse painted this non-narrative portrait of The Siren (1900).

The Sirens (1903) marked Henrietta Rae’s return to painting narrative works featuring classical nudes. Odysseus’ ship is in the distance, as three beautiful sirens use their aulos and lyre to lure its occupants.

Late mythology suggests an unpleasant end for these sirens: Hera challenged them to a singing contest against the Muses. When the latter won, the penalty they exacted of the sirens was to have all their feathers plucked out to turn into crowns. As a result of that disgrace, the sirens turned white, fell into the sea, and formed the islands including modern Souda, on the north-west coast of Crete in the Mediterranean.

Sirens have steadily spread their presence into other paintings, particularly during the twentieth century.

Georg Janny’s fantasy painting of Sirens Bathing by the Sea from 1922 is throughly other-worldly, and there’s no trace of their bird legs.

More cryptic is Paul Nash’s Surrealist Nest of the Siren (1930), which brings together the incongruous, and hardly refers to Homer’s story. The painting is framed by brightly-painted walls with pillared decorations, perhaps ornate wainscot panelling. In the middle of these is what might be a painting, but also seems to be a three-dimensional plant trough containing sinuous shrubs. In the middle of those is a small nest, like an acorn cup.

Standing in front of this is a structure resembling a weather-vane, mounted on a turned wooden shaft. At the weather end of the vane is the faceless figure of a siren; the leeward end appears purely decorative. Three red rods appear to have detached themselves from the walling, two protruding from the plant trough, the third resting on the floor.

They even manage to sneak symbolically into other classical stories.

In Girodet’s ink and chalk drawing of The Meeting of Orestes and Hermione (c 1800), Hermione is seen at the right, her arms folded, looking coy as Orestes approaches her. The second woman, with Orestes, is presumably Hermione’s maid. This is one of a series of illustrations made by Girodet to accompany Racine’s play, and has subtleties you might expect from a great narrative artist. Visible in the gap between the figures is a table-leg in the form not of a Fury foretelling Orestes’ fate, but of a siren, implying that Hermione is luring Orestes to her. Hermione, for all her apparent coyness, has let the right shoulder-strap of her robe slip, in her enticement of Orestes. She has assumed the role of femme fatale, as portrayed by Euripides and Racine.

In more recent literature, sirens appear in the less-known second part of Goethe’s play Faust.

Margret Hofheinz-Döring is one of the few artists who has painted from this second part. With the Sirens from 1962 is her pastel painting showing the sirens among rocky inlets of the Aegean Sea, a sub-scene concluding the second act.