Hercules and the Hydra

Killing the Hydra of Lerna was the second of the twelve labours of Hercules. The monster was a water serpent with many heads, and every head he cut off grew back, so in the end the stumps had to be burned. Sargent painted the fight between 1922 and 1925 for the ceiling of a side aisle of the museum's Huntington Avenue staircase, on a canvas about three and a half metres high, the same size as his Orestes for the same ceilings. In the myth the Hydra kept doing harm after it was dead. Hercules dipped his arrows in its poisonous blood, and one of those arrows later struck the wise centaur Chiron by accident. The museum's 1922 guide to the dome tells that story, because Chiron is up there in the rotunda, in a plaster relief Sargent modelled of him teaching the young Achilles to shoot.