Odysseus nimmt Abschied von Kalypso,

Odysseus was washed up on the island of Ogygia, the sole survivor of a shipwreck. The nymph Calypso held him there for seven years before he continued his journey home to Ithaca. Between 1863 and 1869 Preller painted sixteen murals for the Grand Ducal Museum in Weimar on subjects taken from the Odyssey. He produced replicas of two of the best-known for Schack, who declared: `I do not know which to admire more, the shore replete with all the magic of nature in the South in the one painting, or the raging sea whipped by the wildest storm in the other, with the nymph shooting up from the tip of a wave as though she were spray.¿