This piece depicts not a genuine prodigy, but rather the world's most famous "gaff" or fake. P. T. Barnum created quite a stir in the 1840's when he advertised the acquisition of a genuine mermaid caught off the coast of faraway 'Fegee.' In newspapers and on huge banners he showed beautiful bare-chested mermaids cavorting in the waves, and huge crowds lined up to see the titillating attraction. Even when the supposedly lovely creature was unveiled and proved to be the upper half of a gruesomely petrified monkey attached to the lower portions of a large fish, the crowds still flocked to see it. Barnum wasn't the first to exhibit such a taxidermy creation, but he was the most successful in promoting it. Perhaps hoping to mimic his success or pay tribute to the great man, generations of showmen after Barnum acquired their own Fiji mermaids, so that now a collection of oddities isn't complete without one.

Here I have contrasted the beautiful and the hideous by placing Barnum's mermaid in a situation borrowed from a Raphael painting. The woman who once so calmly held a unicorn must now restrain an entirely different sort of mythical creature.