Daphnis and Chloe

In the early 1850s a group of young French painters, Gerome among them, were reviving a light, decorative kind of antiquity, small graceful scenes of the ancient world rather than grand historical drama. This is one of them, painted in 1852: two nude young lovers leaning against a fountain basin, a doe turning toward the girl. The writer Theophile Gautier later attached the names Daphnis and Chloe, the shepherd couple from an old Greek romance. The public at the 1853 Salon was cool toward it, and the canvas sat unsold for about 17 years before Achille Fould, a finance minister under Napoleon III, finally bought it.