Alceste mourante

Peyron’s Alceste mourante was much admired at the Salon of 1785, three years after the painter had returned from Rome. Peyron had already impressed by The Funeral of Miltiades (also in the Louvre), painted at Rome in 1782, but a subject of heroic female virtue in itself makes something of a welcome change amid much male heroics in the decade, and though echoes of Poussin are loud in the Alceste, there is also a tender, if sombre, moving quality, as well as fine painting.