This head of Galatea is a finished work in its own right. It relates to Girodet’s last large picture Pygmalion et Galatée, finished in 1819, and long remained at the château de Dampierre, until it was acquired by the Louvre in 2002. The artist took six years (1813 – 1819) to complete the work, and in the process executed many preparatory drawings and studies. Many of these works were in the artist’s studio sale held after his death in 1824. Girodet was also recorded in the process of painting the picture by the artist François-Louis Dejuinne (Paris 1784 – Paris 1844), shown at the Salon of 1822. The subject is taken from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, where Pygmalion has created in ivory a statue of female perfection, with which he has fallen in love. Girodet depicts the moment when the statue changes from ivory to flesh through the good offices of the goddess Venus. The subject was also treated famously by Edward Burne-Jones, in the late nineteenth century in a set of four pictures (Birmingham, Museum and Art Gallery) whose titles sum up the spirit of Girodet’s pictures, ‘The heart desires; The hand refrains; The godhead fires; The soul attains’.

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