Lot Girodet's friend and biographer, P-A Coupin offers the most complete description of the scene: "In order to enjoy This tower is guarded, for one can see spear-points, and, in order to show that the guards are asleep, the painter has entwined their spears with poppies.
At the same time, Eros gives her a mirror in which she admires herself with a naive satisfaction While she intoxicates herself with the odor of the flowers and with the knowledge of her own beauty, Eros directs to her heart his all-powerful torch: the god can then appear. The artist was an enthusiastic student of minerology and electricity and he had been greatly influenced by contemporary British thinkers, in particular by his readings of Young's Night Thoughts and MacPherson's Ossian.
The panel is in reverse to both the Leipzig painting and Aubry-Lecomte's print, and it includes variations in the turban, cushions and placement of the putto that reappear in the lithograph, suggesting that it might have been painted to serve as a model for the printmaker. The painting's unusually high quality indicates that it was produced in Girodet's atelier under the master's direct supervision, as Bellenger has noted, and possibly with his personal intervention, and could therefore also have been produced as an entirely independent work for the marketplace.
We are grateful to Sylvain Bellenger, who has examined the present lot in person, for his assistance in preparing this entry. View All.
