Las oréades

Bouguereau painted this in 1902, when he was 77, near the end of a career that had made him one of the most admired and best-paid painters in France. By then the polished mythologies he specialised in were falling out of fashion, pushed aside by the Impressionists and what came after them. He kept at it anyway. Here a whole column of oreads, the nymphs of mountains and caves, spirals up off a rocky pool into the morning sky, while three satyrs on the ground stare after them, left behind. It is a large canvas, well over two metres tall, built to make that upward rush feel weightless. His descendants held on to the painting until 2009, when they gave it to the Musée d'Orsay in Paris.