Mariano Fortuny Y Marsal Art

A stunning impressionist oil on panel depicting the greek myth of Leda and the Swan. Brushed perfectly with splashes of intense colour in a dream like fashion. Oil on panel, signed lower right, 1870. Framed dimensions are 14 inches high by 18 inches wide. Leda and the Swan is a story and subject in art from Greek mythology in which the god Zeus, in the form of a swan, seduces Leda. According to later Greek mythology, Leda bore Helen and Polydeuces, children of Zeus, while at the same time bearing Castor and Clytemnestra, children of her husband Tyndareus, the King of Sparta. In the W. B. Yeats version, it is subtly suggested that Clytemnestra, although being the daughter of Tyndareus, has somehow been traumatized by what the swan has done to her mother. According to many versions of the story, Zeus took the form of a swan and seduced Leda on the same night she slept with her husband King Tyndareus. In some versions, she laid two eggs from which the children hatched. Mariano Fortuny y Marsal studied under Claudio Lorenzale at the school of fine arts in Barcelona. In 1857 he was awarded a bursary to study in Rome. He first visited Morocco in 1860, sent by the city of Barcelona as a war artist to commemorate the Spanish victory at Tetouan with a painting. In 1863 he visited Naples, where he met the painter of historical subjects, Domenico Morelli. In 1866 he went to Paris and became friends with French academic painters such as Jean Léon Gérome and Ernest Meissonier. In 1867 he returned to Rome where he became friends with Henri Regnault. By 1869 he was back in Madrid and began to study Goya's technique in earnest. In 1871, in the company of the French orientalist painter Georges Clairin...