Byblis

Bouguereau painted this in 1884, at the height of a career the young Impressionists were busy rebelling against. He was the great defender of the polished academic nude, and the Paris Salon still rewarded exactly this: flawless skin, a mythological pretext, no visible brushwork. The pretext here comes from Ovid. Byblis was a girl who fell in love with her own twin brother, was refused, and wept without stopping as she wandered after him. Bouguereau shows her sunk by the edge of a pool, head turned away, at the point the story ends. In the myth her endless tears finally dissolve her into a running spring, which is why she lies here so close to the water.