The Prize of the Tournament

In the first part of his career Henry Cros worked in wax. He tinted it right through, painted over it and set real pearls into it, taking his cue from the small wax reliefs and painted portraits of the Renaissance. Here a noble lady stands at the front of a canopied grandstand at a tournament, with four companions behind her in tall medieval headdresses, and pearls stud the headdress of the lady in the middle. She holds the prize across the balustrade, a sword. The knight fighting for her is not shown. The word on the blade reads Briséis, the name of the young woman in Homer's Iliad who was handed to Achilles as a prize of war. The State bought the relief at the Salon of 1873 and sent it to the Musée Calvet in Avignon, where it stayed for about a century.