Venus and Anchises

William Blake Richmond's Venus and Anchises (1889) depicts the mythological encounter between the goddess of love and the Trojan prince Anchises — a story from the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite in which Venus falls in love with a mortal man and reveals herself to him in divine form. Richmond, who painted both classical mythology and Italian landscape, approaches the subject within the British neo-classical tradition of late Victorian mythological painting — related to but distinct from the more sensuous academic treatments of the subject by French painters.

Richmond renders the mythological encounter with the formal gravity of classical tradition: the goddess revealed in divine beauty, the mortal prince in awe, the landscape providing an appropriate setting of Mediterranean grandeur. His technique combines academic figure modeling with the warm Italian palette he developed through travel. The color handling is warm and golden — the specific light of classical antiquity as the Victorian imagination reconstructed it. Compositionally the painting follows the tradition of Renaissance and Baroque mythological figure groups.