Aphrodite

Aphrodite, painted in 1902 and now in the Dahesh Museum of Art in New York, represents Rivière's engagement with Graeco-Roman mythology, a subject area that allowed Victorian painters to combine classical learning with the depiction of the female figure. Aphrodite, goddess of love and beauty, was among the most frequently depicted deities in nineteenth-century European painting, from Bouguereau's academic nudes to Burne-Jones's Symbolist treatments. Rivière's version, arriving late in the tradition, would have negotiated between the Academy's expectations of classical dignity and his own preference for naturalistic observation. The Dahesh Museum, which specializes in academic art of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, provides an appropriate institutional home.

A treatment of Aphrodite would demand confident handling of the female nude or near-nude within a classical setting — the sea, a shell, a garden — with the figure's anatomy as the painting's primary technical test. Rivière's academic training provided the foundation, while his observational discipline prevented the idealization from becoming formulaic.