A siren’s song seems to hang in the air as your eye meets the figure poised above the river, her gaze fixed somewhere beyond the world of mortals. In Die Loreley (Entwurf), Eduard von Steinle conjures the legendary enchantress of the Rhine not as a creature of melodrama, but as a vision both alluring and unsettling. The Lorelei’s pale form is wrapped in luminous drapery, her hair cascading like water itself, while the rocks beneath her echo the sharp, silent threat she represents.

The painter’s brush lingers on her expression—a mixture of longing and warning—while the river below glimmers with a chill, almost supernatural light. Every element draws the viewer upward, toward the figure and the myth she embodies, as if inviting us to call her name and risk the fate her legend promises. Created in 1863 as a preparatory watercolour for a grander canvas, this work belongs to a moment when German Romanticism was still haunted by the mysteries of folklore and landscape. Artists like Steinle were drawn to stories that blurred the line between beauty and danger, and patrons sought images that would stir both pride and unease in the heart of a newly self-aware nation.

Housed today in Munich’s Museum Sammlung Schack, this sketch is a testament to an age when myth was not just remembered, but painted into the very stones and waters of the German imagination. The Lorelei’s gaze still holds us—terrifyingly beautiful, just as the artist intended.