Apollo Pursuing Daphne

Apollo, laurel-crowned and carrying his quiver, lunges toward Daphne as her fingers turn to leaves and her leg to a trunk; the nymph leans back over a white cloth held by a winged Cupid while her father, the river god Peneus, grips the urn from which water pours — the moment of metamorphosis itself, painted with Tiepolo’s swift, radiant touch. Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, the greatest Venetian decorative painter of the eighteenth century, painted this small cabinet picture about 1755–1760, condensing Ovid’s story of Daphne’s escape from the sun god into a burst of excited, off-centre movement unique among treatments of the theme. The canvas passed through Viennese, Parisian, and New York collections before the Samuel H. Kress Foundation acquired it in 1950 and gave it to the National Gallery of Art in 1952. The painting is held in the National Gallery of Art, Washington.