Hesperides - Baudet

Hesperides - BaudetA print of tienne Baudet's Hesperides a 17th century French line engraving treating one of the quieter corners of Greek mythology, the nymphs who tend the garden of golden apples at the western edge of the world. The Hesperides their number varies from three to seven across different sources were the daughters of evening, nymphs who guarded the golden apples that had been Hera's wedding gift from Gaia. The garden lay beyond the ocean in the far west,

classicising figure style of the 17th and 18th century Italian schools

The marble Thorvaldsen eventually delivered now stands in the Thorvaldsens Museum in Copenhagen

The great Roman marble Dioscuri — two colossal standing nude youths with rearing horses — survive in several versions

His mother

Fetching three of the apples was the eleventh labour of Heracles — and the image of the nymphs

A print of Richard Roland Holst's Apollo — the Dutch Symbolist's rendering of the Olympian god of light

and was one of the very commonest subjects on the walls of Pompeii — Venus disarming Mars

slaughtered a flock of sheep believing them to be his enemies

tonal style of the watercolour — colour allowed to bleed into the page

Venus — Aphrodite in the Greek — is the Olympian goddess of love

His journey with the Argonauts is told in the Argonautica

the kind of ruin that has stood in Roman museum courtyards