La mort d'Adonis

Adonis, killed by a boar while hunting despite Venus's warnings, was a myth of tragic beauty and premature loss that attracted academic painters seeking to combine the idealised male nude with pathos. Regnault's treatment on paper — an unusual support for a finished composition — dated 1812 and at the Louvre, may be a preparatory study of high finish rather than a completed autonomous work. By 1812 Regnault was in his mid-fifties, fully occupied with Napoleonic commissions, and the mythological subjects he continued to treat were often smaller in scale and more intimate in conception than his great Salon histories. Venus lamenting over the dead Adonis — the subject implied by the death theme — allowed the combination of female grief and the display of the beautiful male body, a pairing with deep roots in the European tradition from the Florentine Renaissance onward.

Paper as a support implies a work of smaller scale and possibly preparatory character, though high-finish drawings and paintings on paper were also produced as independent cabinet works. Regnault's control of tone and form on paper demonstrates that his academic facility extended beyond canvas and panel.