Aurora und Cephalus

Guérin showed this at the Paris Salon of 1810, when Napoleon's empire was at its height and cool, polished mythology was exactly the official taste. The subject is from Ovid. Aurora, the goddess of dawn, has fallen for a mortal hunter, Cephalus, and lifts the sleeping man up into the clouds, though he is already married and still thinking of his wife. Guérin gives it a chilly, sculpted finish, pale bodies arranged almost like marble, the first light of daybreak breaking behind them. It was bought by an Italian collector, Count Sommariva, one of the busiest art buyers of the Napoleonic years. Guérin is remembered now less for his own canvases than for his studio, where two of the painters who would overturn this smooth manner, Géricault and Delacroix, learned their craft.