Achilles watercolour

Achilles watercolourA watercolour portrait of Achilles, the greatest of the Greek warriors at Troy and the central figure of Homer's Iliad. The hero is rendered in the loose, tonal style of the watercolour colour running into the page, detail allowed to soften at the edges. Achilles was the son of the sea nymph Thetis and the mortal king Peleus, dipped as an infant into the Styx to make him invulnerable all but the heel by which his mother held him. He led the Myrmidons

He produced over 300 covers for the Saturday Evening Post

fire and flood in an attempt to break free

The myth reads the goddess as a literal embodiment of the meeting of sky and sea — violence and procreation

Colossal sculpture — figures substantially larger than life — was used in the ancient world to mark scale and importance: cult statues of gods inside temples

Stabiae and the villas of the surrounding Bay of Naples

Atlas's daughters

The real Arcadia was a remote inland country of shepherds and herdsmen

the "Scraper" — an athlete using a strigil to clean oil

The Phrygian cap — the soft pointed hat of Asia Minor — marked him out as eastern and foreign to the Greek and Roman viewer

in which he stands with a spear

A black and white print of the interior of the Pantheon in Rome — a perfect sphere inscribed into a cylinder

The ruins of Delos — the Terrace of the Lions