The Odyssey

The woman here is not a portrait but a personification, the poem called the Odyssey given a human face. Ingres had first painted her more than 20 years earlier, as one small figure crowded among many at the foot of his grand Apotheosis of Homer of 1827, where the blind poet is crowned like a god. He never quite let that picture go. In 1850, an old man by then, he lifted this single figure back out and made her the whole of a canvas of her own, seated and grave, standing in for Homer's tale of the long voyage home. Ingres reworked his favourite inventions for decades. A collector named Joseph Gillet left this one to the museum in Lyon in 1923.