Dante and Beatrice

Charles Callahan Perkins, a young Bostonian of means, settled in Paris in 1846 to learn to paint and took lessons from Ary Scheffer. He went on to write books on Italian sculpture and to organise much of Boston's musical and artistic life, and in 1870 he was one of the founders of the Museum of Fine Arts. By 1851 he had commissioned this canvas from his former teacher.

The scene comes from the first canto of Paradiso, the last part of Dante's Divine Comedy, and the lines are written on the frame. Dante tells how it suddenly seemed that day had been added to day, as if heaven had been adorned with a second sun, and how Beatrice stood with her eyes fixed on the eternal wheels while he fixed his on her. Scheffer paints exactly that exchange of looks, Beatrice gazing upward and Dante turned toward her. The painting stayed with the Perkins family until 1921, when his heirs sold it to the museum he had helped to found, for 1,600 dollars.