The little mermaid, her dark hair swept back, glides through a forest of writhing gray-green polyps, one arm stretched ahead and a small glowing drop held in her other hand. Skulls, bones and treasure lie tangled among the coiling tentacles, and a broken plank rests on the seabed at lower right. The plate is mounted on a cream page within ruled borders. Edmund Dulac painted it for Hans Christian Andersen's The Little Mermaid in Stories from Hans Andersen, published by Hodder & Stoughton in London in 1911.

Its caption, "At the mere sight of the bright liquid," marks her return from the sea witch with the potion that will give her legs: the polyps, which clutch the bones of drowned sailors, shrink back from the liquid that "sparkled in her hand like a shining star." The V&A notes that new four-color process blocks let Dulac's watercolors be printed more accurately than before. It was one of Dulac's Christmas gift books for Hodder & Stoughton, and the V&A, which owns his original watercolor for a Snow Queen plate in the same book, calls his Andersen pictures some of the most memorable he produced. Our copy is the 1911 edition. It is in the Bancroft Library of the University of California in Berkeley.