Automedon with the Horses of Achilles

Winners of the Prix de Rome, the French Academy's top prize, spent five years in Rome and owed Paris one picture a year as proof of their progress. The first was supposed to be modest, a single nude figure showing that the student could draw the body. Henri Regnault, who had won in 1866, sent this instead, a canvas more than three metres in each direction. The subject comes from Homer's Iliad. Automedon, the charioteer of Achilles, is leading the hero's horses back from the banks of the river Scamander, and they rear against him, foaming at the mouth. They are immortal horses, and in the poem one of them, Xanthus, is given a voice and warns Achilles that his death is near. Regnault said he wanted the picture to carry a foretaste of disaster, and he set the struggle under a dark, stormy sky. He signed it at lower left, Rome, 1868. In January 1871, fighting in the war with Prussia, he was killed at 27. By the following year the canvas belonged to an American, the New York banker Levi P. Morton, later vice president of the United States. In 1884 it went on loan to the Museum of Fine Arts, and for six years money was collected by subscription until, in 1890, the museum could buy it.