Homer and His Guide

André Chénier was guillotined in Paris in July 1794, two days before the fall of Robespierre. Almost none of his poetry had been printed. When his collected poems finally appeared in 1819, one of them, L'Aveugle, told of a blind old man brought ashore by the sea, praying to Apollo for a guide. Three shepherd boys call off the big dogs that guard their flocks, share their food with him, and hear him sing. The old man is Homer.

Bouguereau took that scene for the Salon of 1874. One dog is still barking in the foreground as the boy leads the poet on by the hand, a basket on his arm and Homer's lyre slung across the old man's back. The picture has been in Milwaukee since 1888, part of the gift the meatpacker Frederick Layton made to the art gallery he founded there.