Aurora and Cephalus

Guérin was a pupil of Regnault and a rival of David's school, and here he chose grace over severity. The flesh is smooth and cool, the outlines melt into the clouds, and the colour shades from violet to rose in the manner of the pretty mythologies that were fashionable under the Empire. Look at the little Cupid, who seems to present the sleeper to the goddess, at the flower crown in Aurora's hair and at the way the light comes from the star she holds, so that her body is seen almost against the dark. The signature and date, 1810, are at the lower right.

The picture was shown at the Salon of 1810 and again in 1814. It is usually said to have been painted for the Milanese collector Giovanni Battista Sommariva, who also commissioned Girodet's Pygmalion in this room, and Guérin painted a second version the following year for a Russian patron. Guérin ran the most fashionable studio in Paris and taught Géricault and Delacroix, both of whom would break with the polished style seen here. The Louvre received the canvas in 1888 by bequest. Its pale, dreamlike sensuality shows a side of Neoclassicism that is rarely remembered beside the heroic subjects of David.

Did You Know? Guérin's studio trained both Géricault and Delacroix, who went on to reject exactly this kind of polished, dreamlike painting.