海のヴィーナス

Theodore Chasseriau painted this Venus rising from the sea in 1838, when he was just 19 years old. He had entered the studio of the great Ingres as a boy, and Ingres reportedly called him the Napoleon of painting, expecting him to carry the master's cool, linear classicism into the next generation. You can see that training here in the smooth, sculpted body and the clean outline. But the warm color and the sensuous mood already lean toward Delacroix and the Romantics, the rival camp Ingres despised. Within a few years Chasseriau would leave his teacher's orbit for good. He showed this canvas at the Salon of 1839, and it entered the Louvre through a private donation in 1920.