O Nascimento de Vênus

Gérôme painted this in 1890, near the end of a long career, and by then he stood as the great defender of the old academic order against the Impressionists he openly despised. So the picture is a deliberate statement of that older faith. Venus rises from the sea on a small wave, borne up in a swirl of dozens of little winged putti, one of them clutching a golden apple, the prize of the myth in which she was judged the most beautiful of the goddesses. Every part is finished to a polished, almost sculptural smoothness, the exact opposite of the loose brushwork winning over Paris at the time. Gérôme returned to the female nude and to Greek and Roman myth again and again across his life. This is one of the later flowerings of that lifelong subject, and after passing through a sale in 1991 it went into a private collection.