
Public Domain
French artist Jean-François Millet painted this mythological scene in 1847, one of his rare departures from peasant subjects. Shepherds rescue the infant Oedipus, who was hung in a tree and left to die because his father Laius feared the prophecy that his son would kill him. The dramatic rescue unfolds against a darkening sky.
This painting marked Millet's breakthrough at the Paris Salon after earlier rejections. Beneath the surface lies a hidden painting of Saint Jerome, rejected by the Salon the previous year. Millet reused the canvas, painting over the earlier work. The vertical composition creates urgency as figures strain to free the abandoned child. The National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa acquired the work in 1914, where it remains one of the few mythological subjects in Millet's oeuvre.

Camille Corot
National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, Ottawa

Caspar David Friedrich
National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, Ottawa

Edgar Degas
National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, Ottawa

Pierre Bonnard
National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, Ottawa
Other masterpieces from the Romanticism movement

Francisco Goya, 1823
Museo del Prado, Madrid, Madrid

Eugène Delacroix, 1834
Louvre, Paris, Paris

Francisco Goya, 1814
Museo del Prado, Madrid, Madrid

Francisco Goya, 1800
Museo del Prado, Madrid, Madrid

Francisco Goya, 1823
Museo del Prado, Madrid, Madrid

Eugène Delacroix, 1827
Louvre, Paris, Paris

Francisco Goya, 1800
Museo del Prado, Madrid, Madrid

J.M.W. Turner, 1839
National Gallery, London
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