Diana Asleep In The Moonlight - Gaston Bonfils (1855 - 1946)

Gaston BONFILS
France, 1855 - 1946

Diana asleep in the moonlight

Oil on canvas, 55.5 x 33.5 cm


Gaston Bolfils French painter known for his paintings of scène d' intérieur, this time delights us with a 'symbolist' oil a unicum in his production so far known.

The protagonist of this canvas is precisely the nocturnal atmosphere; the goddess and personification of the full moon Diana, recognizable by the crescent in her hair, her quiver and the trusty dog at her feet, rests in the middle of the night abandoning herself in a deep sleep. It is only the light of the earth's satellite that makes out her profile.
In the appeal of the ancient myth of Diana and Endymion in our painting, it is the observer who replaces Diana and can admire her at will in sleep; Endymion was in fact the mortal man with whom the Goddess fell in love to whom Zeus after her consent gave eternal youth in exchange for eternal sleep. He renounced the fullness of life in order to enjoy every night the loving caress of the Moon, Diana herself in fact descended every night from the kingdom of heaven to admire her sleeping beloved.
Instead, the painter reverses the roles and gives us the opportunity to observe and almost spy on the unchanging beauty of the Goddess in an atmosphere at once mysterious and calm triggered by the choice of a summer night. She precisely by virtue of her divine nature seems unafraid of the forest and the darkness that surrounds her.

Undoubtedly influenced by the 'early' French Symbolisme in which the female nude and restless, dreamlike and mysterious atmospheres were recurrent, the painter in the last two decades of the 19th century gives us a personal interpretation of an ancient myth by stripping Diana from her classical robes and lowering her into a nocturnal landscape of renewed Symbolist sensitivity and suggestion.
The sublime painting technique gives us back, with liquid and brilliant layers of color, the almost opalescent skin of the goddess and an unforgettable 'dreamlike' feeling.