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A Sea-Spell was painted for Rossetti's patron Frederick Leyland, a ship magnate who owned a large number of paintings by the artist. Rossetti first planned to illustrate lines from Coleridge's poem Kubla Khan - "A damsel with a dulcimer / In a vision once I saw" - but the subject was ultimately derived from his own poem, inscribed on the frame that he designed. The musician's "lashing fingers weave the sweet-strung spell" of the siren, a mythological figure whose voice lures sailors to their deaths.
Although sirens were traditionally described as women with the bodies or heads of birds, Rossetti's enchantress retains her human form. The artist evokes all of the senses in his lushly claustrophobic canvas; the siren's dreamy mien suggests that she, too, has been bewitched by the music and by the fragrance of the surrounding flowers. The subject of the dangerous woman, or "femme fatale," flourished in the nineteenth century.
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