Phoebus Apollo

Phoebus Apollo, painted in 1895 and one of Rivière's mythological excursions, depicts the sun god Apollo driving his chariot across the sky — one of the most demanding subjects in Western art, requiring the painter to convincingly render multiple horses in extreme motion against an aerial setting. Rivière, whose horse painting was as accomplished as his lion work, would have relished the technical challenge. Apollo's solar chariot subject had classical precedents from ancient friezes to Baroque ceiling paintings by Guido Reni and Tiepolo, and Victorian painters working in this vein were in conscious dialogue with that tradition while asserting their own naturalistic credentials.

The aerial perspective of a solar chariot subject demanded that Rivière handle horses in foreshortened views against a sky of graduated light — technically among the most demanding compositional problems in figure and animal painting. His study of equine anatomy would have been tested by the unusual angles required by an overhead viewpoint.