Apollo and Daphne

This is a very small picture, about 18 by 36 centimetres, painted on a sheet of copper, which gives oil paint a smooth, enamel-like finish. It tells the story from Ovid's Metamorphoses of the god Apollo chasing the nymph Daphne, who escapes him only by turning into a laurel tree. Albani painted it in Bologna around 1615 to 1620. Its most interesting owner came later. In 1693 André Le Nôtre, the gardener who laid out the park at Versailles, then about 80, gave a group of his finest paintings to Louis XIV, and this little copper was among them. It went on to hang in the royal residences, including Versailles and the Luxembourg Palace, and entered the Louvre when the museum opened in 1793. It now hangs in the Grande Galerie.