Talk:The Sirens and Ulysses

FAC spillover
Looking at the FAC, where I will comment soon, I thought there were a couple of themes it would be good to bring out further, sources permitting, but which I won't put there as they are not really FAC stuff, and I can't suggest sources. The painting was so long forgotten that many which could refer to it in wider discussions won't.

Firstly the painting fits into a very common pattern for British artists of the period (and those of other countries I think), where vast energy and effort is spent producing a large traditional history painting intended to be a smash hit at the RA show, making or confirming the artist's reputation. Usually this flops, at considerable psychic cost to the artist, and the most valued works of the artist today are smaller and less ambitious. James Barry (painter), Benjamin Haydon and a host of less important figures like Richard Burchett exemplify this, though the route did work for some. Not sure how one would rate Daniel Maclise in this context.

Secondly there is more that could be said about the place of the painting as a large mythological history painting with copious nudity - looking back to Titian, forward to later Victorian artists, and sideways to other Romantics. Johnbod (talk) 12:09, 18 March 2015 (UTC)


 * I did consider a broader discussion of the Reynolds-ish (Raphaelite?) tradition Etty was working within, but was very conscious that this is a short article, and didn't want to overload the background section to the extent that it overwhelms the stuff on the actual painting. As you say, the painting was hidden for so long, and has had so little coverage since its unveiling other than understandably self-congratulatory stuff from the MAG, that it's hard to source anything about it; basically, what we have to work with is volume II of Gilchrist's 1855 hagiography of Etty (which I've tried to avoid using), Leonard Robinson's 2007 biography which has the most to say about this particular work but has the disadvantage of being written pre-restoration, and the accompanying book from the 2011 retrospective in York, which the MAG didn't lend TS&U for so doesn't cover it in any detail. Even Etty's ODNB entry only mentions this particular work in passing.


 * By this time, Etty had quite a background in alleged "history paintings" (in practice, in his case invariably a pretext to shoehorn as many naked women as possible into the work). He'd already been elected a full RA a decade before (famously getting the nod over John Constable), so wouldn't have had anything to prove. TS&U fits squarely into a "women flashing their norks in a vaguely mythological setting while burly men watch" furrow Etty had been ploughing for the previous decade, following directly on from works like Venus and her Satellites, the hilariously kitsch Youth of the Prow and Pleasure at the Helm and the wonderfully-named The Destroying Angel and Daemons of Evil Interrupting the Orgies of the Vicious and Intemperate. (I am sorely tempted to turn The Destroying Angel and Daemons of Evil Interrupting the Orgies of the Vicious and Intemperate blue just so Wikipedia can have an article with that title.) I'm willing to believe Robinson's contention, that Etty had an unhealthy tendency to accept suggestions from Myers despite Myers being obviously crazy, and that Myers got it into his head that there was an untapped market for huge paintings. ([Myers] became an admirer of Etty's work in 1832, the year when Etty exhibited Youth on the Helm and The Destroying Angel. These are large works [...] and Myers constantly urged Etty to paint similar large works with subjects that proclaimed a knowledge of classical themes. Myers was convinces that a wealthy clientele existed who would buy such works. Robinson pp.188–19 ) The unwritten and unsourceable, but strongly implied, theme is that the uneducated former Hull apprentice was unduly reverential towards the obviously loopy but Eton-educated Myers. (Myers's letters survive in the York archives—one only has to look at them to see that he wasn't of sound mind.)


 * The best I can do with regards to putting it in a broader artistic context is the mention that Etty was probably inspired by The Disembarkation at Marseilles as regards the arrangement of the sirens, since no source (even Gilchrist) goes into any more detail. There doesn't seem to be any evidence that Etty saw himself as part of any tradition, other than indirectly as part of the Italian tradition via Reynolds's acolytes at the RA. I can source that he made a copy of Titian's Ganymede in 1818, that he wrote an approving letter to his brother about Raphael, Titian and Correggio following a visit to the Louvre, and that he thought enough of Titian to pay a visit to his tomb while he was in Venice, but there's a big jump between "admired" and "imitated". I can source that when Etty was young he attended lectures by John Opie on Titian and Rubens, which gave him the idea of nude paintings – iridescent  19:01, 18 March 2015 (UTC)

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