The Farewell of Hector and Andromache

In 1785 Jacques-Louis David showed The Oath of the Horatii in Paris, and a severe new kind of history painting took over the conversation. David had been Vien's pupil. The next year Vien, close to 70 and back from running the French Academy in Rome, signed this huge canvas for Louis XVI, a scene from the sixth book of Homer's Iliad.

Hector, the Trojan prince, has come in from the fighting to say goodbye to his wife Andromache at the gate of Troy. A kneeling nurse holds up their small son, Astyanax. Hector turns to them in full armour, spear in hand and his tall plumed helmet still on, while his chariot and soldiers wait at the right. In Homer the boy cries out in fear at that nodding horsehair crest, and his father takes the helmet off and laughs.

The picture went to the Salon of 1787, the same exhibition at which David showed The Death of Socrates, and again in 1791. It then spent many years on deposit at Épinal in the Vosges and came back to the Louvre only in 1972.