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Bacchante on a Panther
William Adolphe Bouguereau (French, 1825–1905)
1855
- Medium
- oil on fabric
- Classification
- Painting
- Dimensions
- Framed: 87.3 x 127 x 5.4 cm (34 3/8 x 50 x 2 1/8 in.); Unframed: 71.4 x 111.3 cm (28 1/8 x 43 13/16 in.)
- Culture
- France, 19th century
- Museum
- Cleveland Museum of Art, Modern European Painting and Sculpture
- Credit line
- Bequest of Noah L. Butkin
- Rights
- Public domain (CC0), as the museum states it.
- Who can see it
- Adult profiles and older: its museum's description or title mentions nudity. How works are placed
View at the Cleveland Museum of Art
About this work
Part of a series of six paintings that decorated Etienne Bartholony's house in Paris, these paintings emulate ancient Roman designs. Crisp, cut out forms are set against a gold background painted in imitation of mosaic. Arion was an ancient Greek poet who escaped death by riding away on the back of a sea creature who had been attracted by the poet's song. In the companion picture, a bacchante—a female worshipper of the wine god Bacchus—rides on a panther, the god's symbolic animal. These works were shown at the 1857 Paris Salon exhibition.
