Museum Art Reproductions The Sirens And Ulysses by William Etty (1787-1849, United Kingdom) | WahooArt.com

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"The Sirens And Ulysses"

William Etty (i)
The painting The Sirens and Ulysses depicts a scene from Homer’s Odyssey; Ulysses was warned about the sirens who would lure sailors to their death with their music. Ulysses was curious and had his men tie him so that he may resist their calls, and his crew of men had blocked their ears to prevent them from becoming victims. Here Etty portrays the sirens as naked young women on a shore full of decaying bodies, although sirens have been described as a human-animal chimaera, usually a human-bird chimaera. Ulysses is much larger than the other men in the painting, making him very noticeable. His ship and crew are set against a gloomy background of dark clouds rising. Etty studied dead bodies in different stages of decaying in mortuaries to make the bodies as realistic as possible. This painting was his largest at the time and Etty considered it his best work but some critics commented “a disgusting combination of voluptuousness and loathsome putridity… in the worst possible taste”.

 




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