Aurora and Cephalus is an oil on canvas painting by the French artist Pierre-Narcisse Guérin, from 1810. The canvas depicts verses 661 to 866 of Book VII of Ovid's Metamorphoses. It is held in the Louvre, in Paris.
Description The painting portrays Aurora and Cephalus, two figures from classical mythology; the first, the goddess of dawn (known to the Greeks as Eos), falls in love with the second, the husband of Procris, kidnaps him and tries to seduce him. Like the canvas Morpheus and Iris, this work also depicts a female figure, accompanied by a cupid, who looks to a handsome, androgynous, naked young man sleeping (Morpheus on a bed, Cephalus on a cloud). Aurora raises her arms and lifts a starry veil that symbolizes the night, letting flowers fall from her hands. If Iris is naked, Aurora wears a light and transparent dress that leaves her breasts uncovered.
A second version, from 1811, is now in held at the Pushkin Museum, in Moscow. An oil sketch for the 1811 work has been in the Hermitage Museum, in Saint Petersburg, since 1978 (inventory number GE-10310).
Provenance The Parisian version was exhibited at the Salon which took place in the French capital in 1814. The Russian version and Morpheus and Iris were commissioned by Prince Nikolay Yusupov for his Arkhangelskoye Palace, where it was first exhibited in the Psyche Salon.Кузнецова И. А. Государственный музей изобразительных искусств имени А. С. Пушкина. Французская живопись XVI — первой половины XIX века. Каталог. — М.: Искусство, 1982. — С. 216. In 1834 it was moved to the Moika Palace in St Petersburg and after the October Revolution it and other works from the Yusupov collection were seized for the national collection. In 1924 it entered the Hermitage Museum.Березина В. Французская живопись первой половины и середины XIX века в Эрмитаже. Научный каталог. — Л.: Искусство, 1983. — С. 100. but in 1925 it was transferred to the new Pushkin Museum in Moscow.Кузнецова И. А. Французская живопись XVI — первой половины XIX века. Государственный музей изобразительных искусств имени А. С. Пушкина. — М.: Изобразительное искусство, 1992. — С. 261.
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