Coresus Sacrificing Himself to Save Callirhoe

This was Fragonard's bid for the establishment. He showed it at the Salon of 1765 as his reception piece for the royal Academy, and it worked. The critics cheered, the crown talked of a tapestry after it, and Denis Diderot wrote a long, admiring dream about the scene. The subject comes from an ancient Greek traveller's tale of the priest Coresus, ordered to sacrifice the woman who spurned him to lift a plague from his city, who turns the knife on himself instead. Fragonard stages it as pure theatre, all torchlight and swooning drama. What is odd in hindsight is that he barely followed this triumph up, turning away from grand history painting toward the private, lighter pictures that made him famous. The canvas is in the Louvre.