Ulysses and the Sirens

Ulysses and the Sirens was painted in 1909 when Herbert James Draper was at the height of his powers as a painter of classical mythology with marine settings. The Homeric episode — Odysseus lashed to his mast to hear the Sirens' song while his crew rows past with wax in their ears — had fascinated painters since antiquity, but Draper's version is notable for relocating the Sirens from remote rocks to the ship's hull itself, where they cling and reach towards the hero. This interpretation gave the painting an immediacy that more distant compositions lacked. Draper had trained in London and Paris and absorbed the academic tradition of figure painting, but his mature work showed an increasing fluency in the depiction of the female nude in mythological contexts that suited Edwardian taste. The Ferens Art Gallery in Hull holds the canvas as a major example of late Victorian and Edwardian mythological painting.

Draper structures the composition vertically around the mast, with Odysseus bound at its centre and the Sirens distributed around the hull below and beside him. The sea provides a turbulent, broken-colour ground that contrasts with the smoothly modelled skin of the Sirens. His handling of wet hair and drapery clinging to female figures was a technical speciality.