The Sirens and Ulysses
The Sirens and Ulysses is a large oil painting on canvas by the English artist William Etty, first exhibited in 1837. It depicts the scene from Homer’s Odyssey in which Ulysse resists the bewitching song of the Sirens by having his ship’s crew tie him up. The painting divided opinion at the time of its first exhibition, with some critics greatly admiring it while others derided it as tasteless and unpleasant. It was shown in a major London exhibition of Etty’s work in 1849 and at the 1857 Art Treasures Exhibition in Manchester, but was then considered in too poor a condition for continued public display. Restoration began on the work in 2003, and in 2010 the painting went on display
About The Sirens and Ulysses in brief
The Sirens and Ulysses is a large oil painting on canvas by the English artist William Etty, first exhibited in 1837. It depicts the scene from Homer’s Odyssey in which Ulysse resists the bewitching song of the Sirens by having his ship’s crew tie him up. The painting divided opinion at the time of its first exhibition, with some critics greatly admiring it while others derided it as tasteless and unpleasant. It was shown in a major London exhibition of Etty’s work in 1849 and at the 1857 Art Treasures Exhibition in Manchester, but was then considered in too poor a condition for continued public display and was placed in the gallery’s archives. Restoration began on the work in 2003, and in 2010 the painting went on display in the Manchester Art Gallery, over 150 years after being consigned to storage. It shows three Sirens singing on an island, surrounded by the rotting corpses of dead sailors. Etty painted the same model in three different poses to their classical classical poses, while former curator of the York Art Gallery Richard Green considers their pose a tribute to the Nereids in Rubens’s The Disembensation at Marseilles.
The Sirens are not described in the Odyssey, and the traditional representation of them was as bird-lion or bird-human chimeras, but Etty rationalised the fully human appearance by explaining that their forms became fully human once out of the sea, and followed a number of other approaches to the Greek mythological subject. The three Siren are very similar in appearance, and Etty is known to have made a copy in 1823 of a work he made of which he made a copies of in 18 23. The subject of the painting is not described, but the story of Ulyssed’s encounter with the Siren is told in the book The Odyssey by Alexander Pope. The work was painted using an experimental technique, which caused it to begin to deteriorate as soon as it was complete.
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