The Loves of Paris and Helen
Jacques-Louis David (1748-1825) · 1788
In a bedchamber of Troy, Paris, naked but for a red Phrygian cap and a blue cloak, sits on a stool with a lyre in his hand and looks up at Helen, who leans against his shoulder with her eyes lowered. Her thin pink and white dress slips over her body and she wears a diadem in her fair hair. Behind them a bed hung with blue drapery, a row of caryatids copied from the Erechtheion in Athens, a bow and quiver hung on the pillar at the left and a tripod at the right set the scene in an archaeologist's Greece. The mood is languid and quiet, very different from the stern subjects David was painting at the same time.
The picture was made for pleasure, and it shows. The colours are soft, rose, gold and cream, the light falls evenly, and the couple's linked bodies form a single curve. Look at the details of the room, which David copied from published engravings of antiquities: the tripod, the vases, the frieze on the wall and the ornament of the bed. Helen's hesitation and Paris's confident gaze were read as the seduction that started the Trojan war. The signature and date, in Latin, are at the lower left and record that David made it in Paris in the year 1788.
The comte d'Artois, the king's youngest brother and the future Charles the Tenth, commissioned the picture around 1785 or 1786, perhaps for his bedroom at the château of Bagatelle, and ordered a pendant of Rinaldo and Armida from François-André Vincent, now lost. David showed the canvas at the Salon of 1789, in the same room as the Brutus. When Artois emigrated after the fourteenth of July 1789 his property was seized and then confiscated by the state as the goods of an émigré, and in this way the painting entered the national collection. It is one of the rare cases where David lets the ancient world be simply sensual.
Did You Know? The row of caryatids behind the couple was copied from the Erechtheion on the Acropolis of Athens.
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