Orestes Pursued by the Furies

Bouguereau painted this in 1862, early in his career, when he was still trying to prove he could handle the grand, terrible subjects the academy prized. Orestes has just murdered his mother to avenge his father, and her body has barely fallen before the Furies, the ancient spirits of vengeance, close in on him. He claps his hands over his ears against them and cannot shut them out. Bouguereau showed the picture at the Paris Salon of 1863, and it landed flat. The horrible, the frenzied, the heroic does not pay, he concluded afterward, and he spent the rest of a long and very successful career on nymphs, Madonnas, and peasant girls instead. The dagger still stands in Clytemnestra's chest at the left edge, where he left it.