Heracles Destroying the Stymphalian Birds

Edgar Maxence was about 22 when he painted the picture, and it was probably shown in 1893 in his home city of Nantes, at an exhibition of the Friends of the Arts society, in a section for paintings of the imagination. The subject is one of the labours of Heracles, the killing of the man-eating birds of Lake Stymphalus. Maxence packs the whole episode into one frame. Dead birds already lie at the hero's feet, he draws his bow on a huge bird flying at him, and behind it the rest of the flock fills the sky like a brown cloud. Heracles wears the lion skin from an earlier labour. The sculptor Antoine Bourdelle took on the same story 16 years later with his bronze archer, which is also in the Musée d'Orsay. The museum bought this painting in 2008.