Jupiter et Antiope

Jacques-Louis David is remembered for cold, severe pictures of Roman virtue, painted for a France sliding toward revolution. This is not one of them. He made it around 1771, in his early twenties, still a student who kept failing the Prix de Rome, the prize that would have sent him to study in Italy. Here he works in the soft, sensual manner of the generation before him, Antiope asleep among heavy folds of drapery while Jupiter approaches. David later disowned most of what he did this young, which is partly why the attribution took real work to settle. The painting came down through his own family. He gave it to a cousin, and a descendant left it to the museum in the town of Sens in 1896.