Orestes Pursued by the Furies

In the Greek story, Orestes kills his mother Clytemnestra to avenge his father Agamemnon, whom she murdered when he came home from Troy. The Furies, the spirits who punish crimes against one's own blood, then hunt him without rest. Sargent painted the chase between 1922 and 1925 for the ceiling of a side aisle of the museum's Huntington Avenue staircase, on a canvas about three and a half metres high, and it was installed in 1925. He brought Clytemnestra herself into the picture, and one of the charcoal studies he drew of her for this canvas is now at Yale. In the play by Aeschylus that closes the story, Orestes is put on trial in Athens, and it is the goddess Athena whose vote sets him free.