Oedipus and the Sphinx

Ingres first painted this subject in Rome in 1808, a required exercise sent back to Paris by a young scholarship student. He kept returning to it for the next 56 years. This is the last version, made in 1864 when he was in his eighties, smaller than the first and reversed left to right, so Oedipus leans in from the other side. It was commissioned by Emile Pereire, who with his brother had built France's first passenger railway and then the bank that financed much of the Second Empire. The riddle Oedipus has just answered is man, four-footed as a baby, two-footed grown, three-footed with a stick in old age. Henry Walters bought the picture in Baltimore in 1908 and left his collection to the city when he died.