Landscape with Cephalus and Procris reunited by Diana

This canvas carries the inventory number NG2. In 1824 the British government bought 38 pictures from the banker John Julius Angerstein, and they became the founding collection of a new National Gallery, first shown in his own house on Pall Mall. The story comes from Ovid. Cephalus, a hunter, and his wife Procris had been driven apart by jealousy, and here Diana, goddess of the hunt, stands between them to make peace. Procris offers her husband two gifts, carried by a servant, a hound that never lost its quarry and a spear that never missed. Ovid's readers knew how it ended. Cephalus would later kill her with that spear, mistaking her for an animal in the undergrowth. Claude keeps the moment calm, with cattle wading in a pool where a herdsman is reflected in the water.