Diana and Actaeon is a painting by the Italian Renaissance master Titian, finished in 1556–1559, and is considered amongst Titian's greatest works. It portrays the moment in which the hunter Actaeon bursts in where the goddess Diana and her nymphs are bathing. Diana is furious, and will turn Actaeon into a stag, who is then pursued and killed by his own hounds, a scene Titian later painted in his The Death of Actaeon (National Gallery).
Diana is the woman on the right side of the painting. She is wearing a crown with a crescent moon on it and is being covered by the dark skinned woman who may be her servant. The nymphs display a variety of reactions, and a variety of nude poses.
In 2008–2009, the National Gallery, London and National Gallery of Scotland successfully campaigned to acquire the painting from the Bridgewater Collection for £50 million. As a result, Diana and Actaeon will remain on display in the UK, and will alternate between the two galleries on five-year terms.
Diana and Actaeon is part of a series of seven famous canvases, the "poesies", depicting mythological scenes from Ovid's Metamorphoses painted for Philip II of Spain (after Maximilian II, Holy Roman Emperor had declined Titian's offer to paint them for him). The work remained in the Spanish royal collection until 1704, when King Philip V gave it to the French ambassador. It was soon acquired by Philippe II, Duke of Orléans, nephew of Louis XIV, and Regent of France during the minority of Louis XV, for his collection, one of the finest ever assembled. After the French Revolution, the Orleans collection was sold to a Brussels dealer by Louis Philippe II, Duke of Orléans in 1791, two years before he was guillotined. This dealer then exhibited many pictures from the collection (including the Titians) in London.
The largest share of the collection was thus bought in 1798 by the coal-magnate Francis Egerton, 3rd Duke of Bridgewater, including this painting, Titian's Diana and Callisto (from the same mythological series of seven paintings), eight paintings by Poussin, three Raphaels and Rembrandt's Self-Portrait, aged 51.
The third Duke of Bridgewater was probably inspired to buy the paintings by his nephew, Earl Gower, the ancestor of the Dukes of Sutherland. Certainly, on Bridgewater's death five years after the purchase, he bequeathed the Titians and the rest of the collection to Gower, who put it on display to the public in his London house – it has been on public display ever since. On first seeing the collection there, William Hazlitt wrote "I was staggered when I saw the works ... A new sense came upon me, a new heaven and a new Earth stood before me.". On the outbreak of the Second World War in September 1939, the collection was moved from London to Scotland. Between 1945–2009, the Diana and Actaeon and Diana and Callisto (with other paintings from the collection, known collectively as "the Bridgewater loan" or "the Sutherland Loan") were on long-term display at the National Gallery of Scotland, in Edinburgh. As well as Hazlitt, during their time on public display they have inspired artists such as JMW Turner and Lucian Freud — Freud described the pair as "simply the most beautiful pictures in the world".
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