The Sirens and Ulysses "The Sirens and Ulysses" currently hangs in Gallery Three. 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 Ulysses (Odysseus) 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 Contention of Ajax and Ulysses excerpted and reproduced, sometimes under the title of "Death the Leveller." Included in collections of familiar quotations, the poem is the most famous and popular work in Shirley's canon; Louisa May Alcott quotes its concluding line in "Little Women." The poem was set to music, and was well known as a song — King Charles II was reportedly fond of it. The play is set in the Grecian camp outside the walls of Troy, during the Trojan War; it opens soon after the death of Achilles, with the pages of Ajax and Ulysses disputing the relative worths of their masters.