Arion on a Sea Horse

Bouguereau was 29 and just back from four years in Rome when he took this job. In 1855 the banker Anatole Bartholoni hired him to fit out a room of his Paris house in the Pompeian taste that was then fashionable, eight painted panels in all, this one among them and a companion showing a bacchante riding the panther of the wine god Bacchus. The gold honeycomb ground behind the figures imitates the Roman mosaics Bouguereau had been studying in Italy. Arion was a Greek poet thrown overboard by sailors and carried away by a creature his singing had drawn up out of the sea. What the creature is has never quite been settled. When the two panels were auctioned in Paris in 1933 it was a sea monster, and by a London sale in 1977 it had become a dolphin.