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The following is an archived discussion of a featured article nomination. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the article's talk page or in Wikipedia talk:Featured article candidates. No further edits should be made to this page.

The article was promoted by Ian Rose via FACBot (talk) 06:11, 29 March 2015 (UTC) [1].[reply]

The Sirens and Ulysses

[edit]
Nominator(s): – iridescent 16:45, 15 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]

The Sirens and Ulysses is a enormous William Etty painting which currently takes up almost an entire wall of Manchester Art Gallery, and depending on your point of view is either a technical tour-de-force and a predecessor to later attempts to combine realism and aesthetics, or the nadir of early 19th-century tasteless kitsch. It still retains a surprising ability to startle unsuspecting gallery visitors coming across its life-size naked women/rotting corpses/oiled-up musclemen combination for the first time.

This is slightly unusual for a painting article, as many of the elements one usually finds on visual arts articles don't apply. TS&U was painted 178 years ago but spent 155 of those years out of public view, and the period in which it was on display (1839—1857) overlapped with the ascendancy of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, whose painting style was diametrically opposed to Etty's, and Etty has never come back into fashion. Thus, there's no "legacy" section to speak of, since there's only one other work any art historian considers inspired or influenced by TS&U. (This is the work in question, which I don't consider remotely similar, but we need to reflect the sources etc etc.) In addition to this, Etty had a very literal does-exactly-what-it-says-on-the-tin style—his works tend to have titles like Male Nude with Arms Upstretched or Female Nude in an Landscape—so there's no symbolism to explain other than a brief explanation of the myth of Odysseus and the Sirens for people who aren't familiar with it.

The article is quite short, but I'm fairly confident it covers everything significant that's been written about this piece. Because of its fifteen decades hidden from view, and because it's too fragile to move so hasn't left Manchester since 1849 (Manchester has superb universities, but historically they've always been weak in art history, so works in the MAG tend not to get the attention they'd get in London, Birmingham, Liverpool or Glasgow), very little has been written about it. There have only been two significant publications on Etty since the 1850s, one of which was written before TS&U was returned to display and the other was to accompany an exhibition in which this painting didn't appear so barely mentions it. – iridescent 16:45, 15 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Comments. As always, feel free to revert my copyediting. - Dank (push to talk)

  • "prevent themselves hearing": I'm not insisting on "prevent themselves from hearing", I'm just asking you to consider the advantages in reduced parsing time (particularly in AmEng, but also probably for Brits).
  • More coming if Curly leaves anything for me to do. - Dank (push to talk) 00:42, 16 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  • Continuing. "wealthy Manchester cotton merchant Daniel Grant": It isn't my fight, but quite a few British and Australian writers who I've copyedited for think this is fine without a "the" in front ... including a lot of people at Milhist, and apparently you and the reviewers here. Some Brits say that not sticking a "the" in front puts the tone on a par with The Sun. It would help me out if you guys could come to some agreement.
    • In case you don't know what Dan's talking about, check out false title—or the "anarthrous nominal premodifier" if you're really intent on making it look sinister. Loads of British prescriptionists in have a stick up their rumps about it, but most NAmEng speakers who've heard of it roll their eyes at its supposed unacceptibility. As a NAmEng speaker writing in BrEng it's easy to miss. Curly Turkey ¡gobble! 07:22, 28 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support on prose per standard disclaimer. These are my edits. - Dank (push to talk) 01:01, 28 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Comments from Curly Turkey

[edit]
  • I've made some copyedits. Feel free to revert them.
  • was painted using an experimental technique, and it began to deteriorate as soon as it was complete: in the body it says it was the technique itself that "caused the paint to flake off once dry". I might reword "and it began" to "that caused it".
  • had originally been an apprentice printer: "apprentice" is inevitably a transient thing, so that he was "originally an apprentice" reads strangley to me; I might reword this to something like "William Etty (1787–1849) left a printing apprenticeship in York at 18 to move to London to become an artist."
    • I've fixed this as while he was from York, the apprenticeship was actually up the road in Hull. Etty didn't leave the apprenticeship; he saw out his time, although he left printing the moment his apprenticeship expired. (It's safe to say he didn't enjoy printing; his diary has "Anniversary of my Emancipation from Slavery" every October 23 for the rest of his life.) The wording here is an artefact of the Victorian class system. "Apprentice printer" is a lower-class job, while "trainee painter at the Royal Academy" is on a much more rarefied level—I'm trying to make it clear without slipping over the line into OR that Etty hauled himself up through the ranks. The "poor boy made good" element is important as regards TS&U, as Etty's lack of education explains why he was so willing to accept suggestions from the obviously-crazy-but-classically-educated Myers, even when they were patently loopy ideas like "what the world is waiting for is a fifteen-foot long painting of three naked women and a mound of rotting corpses". – iridescent 11:47, 16 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  • Throughout his early career Etty was highly regarded by wealthy lawyer Thomas Myers, who had been educated at Eton College and thus had a good knowledge of classical mythology, and who from 1832 onwards regularly wrote to Etty to suggest potential subjects for paintings.: Pretty long sentence—could it be cut in two?
  • in which the hero Ulysses (Odysseus in the original Greek): this reads almost as if they were different characters, rather than different names. I'd suggest either "called Odysseus", or put "Odysseus" in quotes. I might even shunt it into a footnote, or remove it entirely.
    • I toyed with various ways to approach this, but couldn't find a satisfactory one. The trouble is, in modern use (including on all Wikipedia's pages about the myth) "Odysseus" is used almost exclusively and "Ulysses" is almost obsolete, so it's not reasonable to assume the reader will know that "Ulysses" is a reference to the Odyssey and not to Tennyson's 1833 Ulysses or even to James Joyce's later novel. – iridescent 11:47, 16 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  • which would lure sailors to their deaths: by shipwrecking them, right? I'd say so, rather than leaving it to readers' imaginations that the sirens would, say, catch and eat them.
    • Depends which version of the myth you follow—the Odyssey just says "their song is death". The story of the Sirens is one of those stories like Noah's Ark and Jonah & the Whale in which the source text is only a few lines long, but a whole mythology has build up over the years based on the original. In some versions the song hypnotises sailors so they crash their ships on the shore; in others it's the song itself that's fatal. In the Alexander Pope version from which Etty was probably working, the Sirens are so intelligent that passing sailors voluntarily choose to land on their island to learn from them, and never leave; in Ulysses's case they promise to tell him the true history of Troy if he stays with them. Neither Homer nor Pope ever spells out just what the sirens do with the sailors once they've caught them—"The ground polluted floats with human gore / and human carnage taints the dreadful shore" leaves it open as to whether they ate them or just left them to rot. – iridescent 11:47, 16 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  • former curator of York Art Gallery Richard Green (2011): was he "former" at the time of writing (2011)?
  • I think a colon (or period) would be more appropriate than a semicolon in some cases: was well suited to Etty's taste; as he wrote at the time—The work, and Etty's methods in making it, divided opinion; The Gentleman's Magazine considered it
  • On leaving at the end of the evening, Grant suddenly said, "Will you take the money?", startling Etty who in his surprise agreed.: this means Etty initally refused the £250 but at the end of the evening accepted it?
    • Grant offered Etty the money and was refused, then as Etty was leaving offered it again out of the blue and Etty said yes before having the chance to think about it. This is a hard one to write clearly, as the situation only makes sense when you take into account the "a gentleman never takes an agreement back" code of honour, which meant Etty would have felt unable to retract the agreement even though he'd agreed without thinking it through. – iridescent 11:47, 16 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  • The old canvas was replaced: I think this will come as a shock to most readers, who will imagine this as like removing a drawing from its paper—could this be elaborated?
    • Oil paintings aren't painted directly onto canvas (or wood, plaster, brick etc). The surface is coated with a thick layer of goop known as the "size" (traditionally rabbit-skin glue), and the painting is painted onto the size. Once the whole thing is dry, the size containing the painting can be transferred between panels/canvases (a number of paintings which are now on canvas started off painted onto wooden panels in churches), in a process known as 'relining' in the US and 'lining' in the UK. Normally, when covering something technical and unintuitive like this, I'd include a wikilink to the Wikipedia page explaining the process—however Painting restoration has a reasonable claim to be the single worst page on the whole of Wikipedia* so I'm reluctant to direct anyone there. If you think it's worthwhile, I can include a footnote explaining the process. (The trouble is, sources on the restoration of TS&U are either specialist sources which will assume the reader already knows the technicalities of lining a painting, or newspaper coverage which doesn't go into detail of exactly what was done.) – iridescent 11:47, 16 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
      *Actually, the single worst page on the whole of Wikipedia is Religious and mythological references in Battlestar Galactica, but I live in hope that someone will one day be brave enough to AFD that.
    • Wow, that's not even hyperbole about Painting restoration (and after 62 edits!). This is unfortunate, as this statement will sound nigh-impossible to most readers. Perhaps "It was transferred to a new canvas" sounds at least more likely? Curly Turkey ¡gobble! 23:27, 16 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Now a new Lining of paintings, thanks to User:Ruskinmonkey. Johnbod (talk) 16:13, 19 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
I've clarified the restoration section slightly, to make it clearer what was done and to mention the earlier vague attempts at restoration. Per my comment on your talkpage, although this means citing a YouTube video I think it's legitimate in this case, as it's an official video with commentary from the restorers. – iridescent 17:44, 20 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  • Gallery Nine of the Manchester Art Gallery, which had been the location of the temporary restoration studio: Was Gallery Nine converted to the studio, or did it become Gallery Nine after the studio work was complete?
    • The end of the gallery was turned into a temporary studio, so visitors could watch the restoration work. Once the restoration was complete, the painting went up on the wall and the room went back to being a normal display room. – iridescent 11:47, 16 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Okay, what I was trying to get at was I nearly combined this sentence with "In 2006 a section of the gallery was converted into a temporary studio." I can't do that unless I'm sure the section was called Gallery Nine before it was set up as a studio. Curly Turkey ¡gobble! 23:27, 16 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, it would have been Gallery Nine before, during and after. – iridescent 18:03, 17 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Okay, I've reworked that final paragraph. Let me know if you have any issues with it. Curly Turkey ¡gobble! 04:52, 19 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Crisco comments and image review

Images are okay — Crisco 1492 (talk) 23:39, 17 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]

  • Per WP:LEADLENGTH, the lead should not be this long
    • I disagree. WP:LEADLENGTH is a vague suggestion, not a set-in-stone rule; there's nothing obvious to cut from the lead, and there's no point cutting-for-the-sake-of-cutting just to comply with it. Halkett boat, Abuwtiyuw, Manchester Mummy, ROT13, Double Seven Day scuffle, Thomcord, Action of 1 August 1801, New York State Route 373, Interactions and How a Mosquito Operates are all current FAs shorter than this one with three-paragraph leads—if it passes, it's not going to be some kind of bizarre outrider. – iridescent 18:17, 17 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
      • Couple counterpoints: first, some of those three-paragraph leads are considerably shorter (How a Mosquito Operates is 179 words in the lead, to the 268 here). Second, you've not touched on the many, many short articles which follow WP:LEAD's advice (MissingNo., for instance). At the very least the lead should be trimmed. If you want three paragraphs, that's fine, but having over 15% of the article's length in the lead (18%, by my count) strikes me as a bit much. — Crisco 1492 (talk) 23:39, 17 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
        • I'm not seeing it. At present the body text is roughly 8500 characters, and the lead is 1571 characters, which doesn't seem wildly unbalanced. There doesn't appear to be anything that can obviously be removed from the lead; it says that TS&U is a painting, what it's a painting of, why it's significant, where it is, and why it was hidden for so long. The only things I can see that could potentially be cut are "While traditionally the Sirens had been depicted as human-animal chimeras" and "Possibly owing to its unusually large size, 442.5 cm by 297 cm (14 ft 6 in by 9 ft 9 in)". It could be re-divided into two rather than three paragraphs, with a split after "tasteless and unpleasant", if it's just the number of paragraphs that's the issue. – iridescent 17:56, 20 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  • "The Sirens are similar in appearance, and likely to depict the same model in three different poses." - I get the feeling "to" should be dropped
  • market for very large paintings, and encouraged Etty to work on large canvasses. - can we avoid the repetition of large
  • Ulysses encountering the Sirens, a scene from the Odyssey in which the hero Ulysses (Odysseus in the original Greek) - avoid repeating his name?
  • Leonard Robinson (2007) and Richard Green (2011) - year's not really that pertinent here. I'd leave these for the ref
  • Etty was hoping for £400 for the pair, but on being told by Grant that his firm had lost £100,000 that year offered a price of £300 for the pair - The pair / the pair
  • release it for the exhibition until Etty, and a number of influential friends, visited Manchester to beg them to release it - release it ... release it
  • Any critical reception since the painting was put on display again? Comments whether or not the funds used were worth it? — Crisco 1492 (talk) 13:44, 16 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
    • Not that I can find. There are a few "Painting goes back on display" type stuff in the local papers along these lines, but no national coverage and nothing obviously pro or anti. (Because the restoration was privately funded, it wouldn't have generated "why are you spending money one this when children are dying" faux-outrage in the Daily Mail, and the Manchester local papers aren't what you'd call critical—if you sent out a press release saying you were going to sacrifice a goat in Spinningfields, the Manchester Evening News would run with "Manchester Leads Way In Goat Sacrifice".) In 2014 an artist temporarily exhibited a giant crocheted breast next to it, which got some coverage in the national press [2], [3], but that seems too ephemeral to mention in the context of an article on the painting (although it would be worth mentioning the link if someone ever writes Big Booby #2). The conservation team obviously did a good enough job that the lead conservator is now doing the same for another painting, but again that doesn't seem relevant enough to this particular article to warrant including. – iridescent 18:03, 17 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
      • Alright, reading the Evening News source, I agree there doesn't seem to be any critical commentary on the painting itself. I still consider local papers of some value, but in this case it doesn't matter. — Crisco 1492 (talk) 23:39, 17 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Source review - spotchecks not done

  • I'm not sure it makes sense to include the location for every citation in which the publisher includes that location (Manchester), but then not include location for PCF - would suggest just dropping location. Nikkimaria (talk) 17:13, 20 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
    • I semi-agree, and have removed the location fields for all citations in which the location is obvious (Manchester Evening News, Manchester Art Gallery). For the books, I think they need to remain. I wouldn't add a location for the PCF, as that would mean needing to add a location for the BBC (mentioned in the same ref), which is a political hot potato. – iridescent 17:41, 20 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support fine article, though I have a couple of points:
  • I did wonder what was "traditional" in "while the Sirens hold out their arms in traditional dramatic poses". I suspect the poses owe at least as much to contemporary theatre (which often included ballet) as Rubens or any other artistic predecessors.
  • "hung in the Academy's new building at Trafalgar Square (now the National Gallery)" could be rephrased - the building was built as the National Gallery, but had just started housing the RA (as paying tenants?) in one wing.
  • Presumably there were no contemporary prints? If we know that it is worth saying, both in terms of influence and money.

Johnbod (talk) 14:39, 27 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]

  • Thanks! See the GA review for a bit more on the "traditional poses". The original wording of the source is '…but as usual they are studio poses […] and also as usual Etty presents them holding out their arms in conventional "artistic" attitudes. It is very likely that Etty's work was always affected, and adversely, by his regular attendance at the Academy Life Classes where models were "set" in a traditional manner. [At the Academy] if the human figure was presented it had to be heroic, classical and "artistic"', and the wording in this article is my attempt to preserve the gist of this while avoiding the word "heroic"—it's a technically correct term, but will look very odd to casual readers. (If one doesn't know what is meant by "heroic pose", the sentence reads as "they heroically ambushed and killed passing travellers.") I've no particular doubt that Robinson is correct here—Etty was chronically insecure about his ability, and even when he was a full Royal Academician continued to take their life drawing classes. His female figures tend to be either in standard theatrical dramatic poses, or in poses directly lifted from other works.
  • I'm reluctant to go into tangential detail about the RA's location unless you feel it's really necessary—for 99.9% of readers "in London" is all they want to know. From the opening of the current National Gallery building until 1868 the RA was in the east wing and the NG in the west. (I don't think the RA paid rent to the NG; as far as I'm aware, the building was granted to both by the Government, and when it got overcrowded the RA was paid off with the choice of either Burlington House or a new building in Kensington as an enticement to move out. From the original Hansard debate, the original proposal was that the RA take over the whole of the present-day National Gallery building, and the National Gallery be sent off to Burlington House.) The only reason I mention that the RA was then in the NG building is to make it clear that despite its supposed obscenity TS&U was shown off in their spanking new building, not hidden in an outpost somewhere; once that's done we then need to explain that the RA later moved as otherwise well-intentioned people will correct "Trafalgar Square" to "Burlington House".
All I had in mind was something like "hung in the new building on Trafalgar Square then shared by the National Gallery and the Academy", avoiding the present implication that the NG was somewhere else, or didn't yet exist. It should be clear enough which new building is meant, I think, or that could maybe be clarified in a note. Johnbod (talk) 17:51, 27 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
I can't see an obvious way to word it that isn't going to look very clumsy—it needs to say "it was hung in the Royal Academy section of the building which was then shared between the Royal Academy and the National Gallery, and since 1868 has been exclusively the National Gallery". How about leaving it as it stands ("…and hung in the Academy's new building at Trafalgar Square (now the National Gallery)"), but with a footnote explaining that they were two unrelated institutions which shared an building until 1868 and the whole thing is now the National Gallery? – iridescent 18:47, 27 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  • I'm unaware of any contemporary (or indeed modern-day) prints. Given the difficulty he had shifting the original, I'd be surprised if there were—"naked women sitting on a pile of decaying cadavers" was always going to be something of a niche market. A skim through those auction house records which are searchable doesn't show a print of it ever selling. Because it was lost so soon for so long, it vanished from popular culture to the extent that even today the print-on-demand outfits don't even list it (even the Manchester Art Gallery's own shop doesn't sell it as a print). – iridescent 17:26, 27 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
I don't know that a single reproductive print makes up a lot - I think you normally get a bundle of some sort. There's nothing in the 86 Etty items in the BM online catalogue, which includes many duplicates, & I think pretty firmly means no print was done of this, unlike many other Etty paintings (& showing no reluctance to reproduce nudity). Maybe one could mention that absence. Johnbod (talk) 18:02, 27 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
There's nothing in the V&A either, which has pretty much every significant print of the 19th century, which makes me virtually certain no prints exist. (It's not the nudity that people had a problem with—by 1837, anyone with an interest in art knew to avoid Etty if they had a problem with nudity—but the photorealistic corpses, which it's reasonable to assume not many people wanted on their dining-room wall, and in particular the juxtaposition of the nudes and the cadavers.) However, without a source that says "no print was made of this", I'm reluctant to mention it, since it's well over the WP:OR line to infer that because none exists, none was made. – iridescent 18:47, 27 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
The above discussion is preserved as an archive. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this page.
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