Andrômeda

By 1869 Gustave Dore was one of the most reproduced artists alive, but not for anything like this. His wood-engraved illustrations for Dante, the Bible and Don Quixote were in homes across Europe and America, and that very success annoyed him. He wanted to be received as a serious painter, and kept turning out large canvases the Paris critics mostly ignored. Andromeda is one of them. The princess of the Greek myth is chained to a rock by the sea, left as a sacrifice to a monster, pale against the dark water and given almost the whole tall canvas. The painting stayed in private hands for generations and now hangs far from Paris, in a museum in Tainan, in southern Taiwan.