O Rapto

In late March 1918 German shells were falling on Paris and the spring offensive was under way. The British Treasury had sent John Maynard Keynes over to negotiate war credits, and while he was there the contents of Degas's studio came up for auction. Keynes had talked money out of the Treasury for the National Gallery, bought for the nation, and bought this one for himself. Cézanne had painted it 51 years earlier, at 28, in the Paris flat of his old schoolfriend from Aix, Émile Zola, who kept it until his death. Degas acquired it from Zola's estate sale. The subject is usually taken to be Pluto carrying off Proserpine, though some read the pair as Hercules and Alcestis coming back out of the underworld. Keynes left it to King's College, Cambridge, and it hangs a few streets away in the Fitzwilliam Museum.