Leda and the Swan

Eugene Delacroix built his fame in oil, on large dramatic canvases. Fresco, painting straight into wet plaster, he tried exactly three times in his whole life, and all three came in a single autumn. In 1834 he was staying at Valmont, a former Benedictine abbey in Normandy that belonged to his cousin Alexandre Bataille. There he worked three mythological scenes onto the walls: Bacchus with a tiger, the poet Anacreon with a young woman, and this one, Zeus in the shape of a swan beside Leda, who in the myth becomes mother of the twins Castor and Pollux. Fresco dries matte into the plaster, a chalky finish his glossy oils never had. All three were later detached from the wall and now hang together at the museum in his old Paris studio.