The Winter - Juno beseeches to destroy Eneas' Fleet

Frederic Hartmann, an Alsatian textile manufacturer with a taste for new French painting, asked Delacroix around 1856 for four canvases of the seasons. Delacroix was then deep in the murals for the chapel at Saint-Sulpice in Paris, work that swallowed most of a decade, and the seasons kept sliding down his list. He chose to tell each one as a story out of classical mythology. Winter is the opening of the Aeneid, where Juno goes to Aeolus, keeper of the winds, and asks him to wreck the fleet carrying Aeneas towards Italy. The season arrives in the picture as the storm that follows. Delacroix died in August 1863 with all four canvases still in the studio and none of them finished. They hang together now in Sao Paulo, left at the stage where he stopped.