Apollo in His Chariot with the Hours

Painted ceilings with Apollo driving the sun across the sky have a long history. One of the best known is Guido Reni's in Rome, finished in 1614, where the Hours, goddesses of the times of day, dance round the god's chariot. When the Museum of Fine Arts asked Sargent to continue his decoration from the rotunda down the main staircase, he gave the same subject the centre of the staircase ceiling, on a curved canvas more than seven and a half metres long. Apollo sits in a gilded chariot with a great spiralling wheel, holding the reins of white horses that rear toward the right. The Hours run with him, pale and naked, and one of them has reached the horses' heads, her arm flung up. At the far right edge, under the hooves, a figure wrapped in a dark cloak and wearing a small crescent moon is pushed out of the picture as the day comes in. Sargent painted the canvas between 1922 and 1925, and it was installed in that last year, high above the stairs that climb from the Huntington Avenue entrance.