Médée

By 1870 Anselm Feuerbach had spent more than a decade in Rome, chasing a grand antique manner that German buyers kept finding cold and unfashionable. This is one of the pictures he built to answer them. Everyone in his audience knew how the story of Medea ends: abandoned by Jason, she murders the two children she had with him. Feuerbach painted the hour before. Medea sits on the shore with her boys while Jason and his crew heave their boat back into the surf, and nothing terrible has happened yet. King Ludwig II of Bavaria bought the canvas in 1879, the year before the painter died, and it hangs in Munich now with the surf still unbroken.