Paris and Oenone (1791): Art, History and Details

Paris and Oenone (1791) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is John Flaxman (British, 1755–1826).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

Although he identified himself first and foremost as a sculptor, John Flaxman’s greatest fame and most lasting influence rest with his drawings. Engravings made after his spare designs illustrating classical epics by Homer, Dante, and Hesiod became the most celebrated work in his oeuvre and spread his stylized linearity widely. This highly finished, signed and dated drawing was made while Flaxman was in Rome and needed to supplement his income while trying to obtain commissions for sculpture. Flaxman chose an obscure classical subject: the famous Trojan shepherd, Paris, with his first love, the nymph Oenone. The scene takes place on Mount Ida, in an idyllic time of peace before Paris was called upon to judge the beauty of the goddesses Hera, Athena, and Aphrodite, thus instigating the Trojan War.

Object facts

• Title: Paris and Oenone
• Date: 1791
• Creator attribution: John Flaxman (British, 1755–1826)
• Culture: England, 18th century
• Type: Drawing
• Technique: brush and gray wash with pen and pale gray-black ink with graphite and brown ink
• Dimensions: Sheet: 30.3 x 48.8 cm (11 15/16 x 19 3/16 in.); Secondary Support: 35.1 x 53.6 cm (13 13/16 x 21 1/8 in.)
• Collection: DR - British
• Department: Drawings
• Accession number: 2008.35

A detail from the museum

John Flaxman called his drawings "outlines," referring to their sparse style.

Collection credit

Purchase from the J. H. Wade Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Lemonedes, Heather. "'Graceful in the Extreme': A Neoclassical Drawing by John Flaxman," Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide (Summer 2012).
• Lemonedes, Heather. British Drawings: The Cleveland Museum of Art. Exh. Cat. Cleveland, OH: Cleveland Museum of Art, 2013.
• Cleveland Museum of Art. The CMA Companion: A Guide to the Cleveland Museum of Art. Cleveland: Cleveland Museum of Art, 2014.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.