Diana Imploring Jupiter Not to Subject Her to the Laws of Marriage (Sketch)

This canvas is barely a third of a metre on each side, yet it holds a ceiling. It is Prud'hon's sketch for Diana Imploring Jupiter, the painting nearly three metres wide that he was commissioned to paint in 1801 for a room of ancient sculpture in the Louvre and that is dated 1803. A painter of his time worked out a big decoration at this size first, to fix where the figures go and how the colours and light will fall, and to show the patrons what they were paying for.

The main group is already there. Jupiter sits on his throne with his back half turned to us, and Diana flies up to him with her quiver on her shoulder and reaches for his hands. Around them the brushwork stays quick and loose, and the gods who watch from the clouds on the right are only a few pale strokes, things to be decided on the full-size canvas.

The sketch came to the Louvre as a gift in 1878. It hangs upstairs among the paintings, in a room shared by Prud'hon and the landscape painter Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes, while the finished ceiling is still in place on the ground floor, in the Greek antiquities.