Bacchante on a Panther

In the 1850s the smartest Paris interiors were being dressed up as Roman villas, with walls painted in the manner of those uncovered at Pompeii. Bouguereau was 29 and newly back from his prize years in Rome when Anatole Bartholoni commissioned a set of panels for his house in that style, and this oval is one of them. A bacchante, a follower of the wine god Bacchus, rides his animal, the panther, holding the thyrsus, a staff tipped with a pinecone. Behind her, the gold honeycomb pattern imitates the Roman mosaics he had studied in Italy. The Cleveland Museum of Art notes that the waxy skin and the gold leaf were meant to glow under the house's gas lighting. Its partner shows the Greek poet Arion escaping on a sea creature. The pair went to the Salon of 1857, came up in the same Paris sale in 1933, and were sold together in London in 1977 before reaching Cleveland.