Sirens and Ulysses (c1837). Oil on canvas. 297 x 443. 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 Ulysses resists the bewitching song of the Sirens by having his ship's crew tie him up, while they are ordered to block their own ears to prevent themselves from hearing the song. While traditionally the Sirens had been depicted as human-animal chimeras, Etty portrayed them as naked young women, on an island strewn with decaying corpses. 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. Possibly owing to its unusually large size, 442.5 cm by 297 cm, the work initially failed to sell, and was bought later that year at a bargain price by the Manchester merchant Daniel Grant. Grant died shortly afterwards, and his brother donated The Sirens and Ulysses to the Royal Manchester Institution. The Sirens and Ulysses was painted using an experimental technique, which caused it to begin to deteriorate as soon as it was complete. 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. York-born William Etty had originally been an apprentice printer in Hull, but on completing his apprenticeship at the age of 18 moved to London to become an artist. Strongly influenced by the works of Titian and Rubens, he became famous for painting nude figures in biblical, literary and mythological settings. While many of his peers greatly admired him and elected him a full Royal Academician in 1828, others condemned the content of his work as indecent. In his depiction of the scene, he probably worked from Alexander Pope's translation, Their song is death, and makes destruction please. / Unblest the man whom music wins to stay / Nigh the curs'd shore, and listen to the lay. In verdant meads they sport, and wide around / Lie human bones that whiten all the ground. / The ground polluted floats with human gore / And human carnage taints the dreadful shore. The Sirens and Ulysses shows three Sirens singing on an island, surrounded by the rotting corpses of dead sailors. Ulysses is visible in the background tied to the mast of his ship, while dark clouds rise in the background. Ulysses appears larger than his fellow sailors, while the Sirens hold out their arms in traditional dramatic poses. The three Sirens are very similar in appearance, and Etty's biographer Leonard Robinson believes it likely that Etty painted the same model in three different poses. Robinson considers their classical poses to be the result of Etty's lifelong attendance at the Academy's Life Classes, where models were always in traditional poses, while former curator of York Art Gallery Richard Green considers their pose a tribute to the Nereids in Rubens's The Disembarkation at Marseilles, a work Etty is known to have admired and of which he made a copy in 1823. The physical appearance of the Sirens is not described in the Odyssey, and the traditional Greek representation of them was as bird-lion or bird-human chimeras. Etty rationalised the fully human appearance of his Sirens by explaining that their forms became fully human once out of the sea, an approach followed by a number of later painters of the subject. Etty put a great deal of effort into the painting, including visiting a mortuary to sketch the dead and decaying bodies on the Sirens' island. His use of real corpses became publicly known, causing complaints from some critics. Although he visited Brighton in 1836 to make studies of the sea in connection with the painting, Etty had little experience of landscape and seascape painting, and the painting of the sea and clouds is rudimentary in comparison with the rest of the work. The painting was Etty's largest work to that time, measuring 442.5 cm by 297 cm. The work was completed in 1837 and exhibited at the Royal Academy of Arts later that year, and hung in the Academy's new building at Trafalgar Square. The work, and Etty's methods in making it, divided opinion: The Gentleman's Magazine considered it by far the finest that Mr. Etty has ever painted. it is a historical work of the first class, and abounds with beauties of all kinds, while The Spectator described it as a disgusting combination of voluptuousness and loathsome putridity, glowing in colour and wonderful in execution, but conceived in the worst possible taste.