For the Sunday before Hallowe’en, an appropriately spooky choice of picture: A Siren by Moonlight, painted by the Belgian artist Paul Delvaux in 1949. The work is owned by Southampton City Art Gallery, where it currently forms part of a new exhibition, “Curiouser and Curiouser: A Surrealist Sensation.”
The mythical temptress reclines on a plinth, posed like a statue, although the glow of her skin and her flowing blonde hair show her to be a creature of flesh and blood. She gazes abstractedly at her fishy tail, as if puzzled by her own hybrid nature. The city square in which she finds herself is formed by arcades of apparently functionless classical facades, with ornately carved pediments supported by corinthian columns. It resembles a stage set, or the setting of a dream. The air of unreality is heightened by the eerie radiance of a full moon. The scene is lit so brightly that middle tones are annihilated, harshly isolating objects and their shadows.
The artist has carefully worked out the vanishing point of his perspective scheme, leaving the ghost of his own calculations in the form of a grid of converging lines, which also happens to describe the paving of the square as it recedes (a device borrowed from the Renaissance cityscapes of Piero della Francesca and Paolo Uccello, whose work Delvaux had seen on trips to Italy). Behind, a short pier leads to the sea, whence the beached chimera in the foreground has presumably come. She seems unnaturally large, perhaps in keeping with her monstrous nature. Many relationships of scale appear distorted in the picture, an effect emphasised by the exaggerated linear correctness of its perspective. Looking at it is like looking into a peepshow theatre where things have been deliberately made bigger or smaller than they should be....
