Andromache und Pyrrhus

Guerin showed this at the Paris Salon of 1810, when Napoleon was near the height of his power and French painters were expected to speak in the grave voice of ancient Rome. The scene comes from Racine's tragedy Andromache. Pyrrhus, the Greek victor, sits enthroned in red while Orestes brings a demand that the boy be killed. Andromache, the widow of Hector, is wrapped in white, her arms closed around her son Astyanax. Guerin folds two moments of the play into one room, so you read the threat and the mother's defiance at once. Louis XVIII bought it for the crown in 1822, after Napoleon had fallen; the picture outlasted the empire whose taste had shaped it.