Sketch for Phaethon

The ride that ends in this picture began with a taunt. In Ovid's telling, a boy of Phaethon's own age mocked him for believing his mother when she said his father was the Sun. Phaethon travelled to his father's palace in the east for proof, and the Sun, to reassure him, swore by the river Styx to give him whatever he asked. He asked to drive the chariot of the sun for one day. An oath sworn by the Styx could not be taken back, even by a god, and his father could only warn him of what lay ahead. Between 1922 and 1924 Sargent worked out the end of that ride in this sketch, in oil over pencil, for one of the ceiling paintings of the museum's grand staircase. The canvas is square, about 90 centimetres on each side, with the circle of the composition marked out inside it. The finished painting is round and more than three times as wide.