Antíoco y Estratonice

Ingres finished this in Rome in 1840, on a commission the Duke of Orleans had given him six years earlier. The story is an old one from antiquity. The young prince Antiochus has fallen secretly in love with Stratonice, his own father's new wife, and is wasting away from a sickness no one can name. The physician Erasistratus finds the cause by watching the prince's pulse leap the moment she enters the room. Ingres builds the scene like a stage, a precise marble interior in cool clear colour, the prince turned away in shame, the doctor reading him, the queen standing apart. He used people around him as models, his own wife for the physician and himself for the anxious old king. The Duke of Aumale later bought it for Chantilly.