Apollo and Daphne

The story is the first love story in Ovid's Metamorphoses. Apollo mocked Cupid's little bow, so Cupid shot him with a golden arrow that made him love and shot the nymph Daphne with a leaden one that made her run. Just as the god was catching her, beside the river of her father, the river god Peneus, she begged to be rid of the beauty that had brought this on her, and she turned into a laurel.

Here the running is over. Daphne stretches upward with her arms above her head, her legs already rooted in the ground, and Apollo has fallen to his knees and wraps his arms around her as she changes. In Ovid he goes on loving the tree, feels her heart still beating under the new bark, and takes the laurel as his own, which is why its leaves crowned victors and poets.

Chassériau painted it in 1844 or 1845 on a small canvas, about half a metre high. In 1845 it was on view in the foyer of the Odéon, the theatre on the Left Bank of Paris.