The Tinted Venus (detail)
A member of the Royal Academy, John Gibson was one of the first neoclassical sculptors to paint his marble statues. His Venus, which created a sensation when first shown at the London International Exhibition in 1862, holds the golden apple offered to her by Paris. It both entranced and scandalized Victorian society, and also suggests the same polychrome realism of the Cnidian Aphrodite.
Edgar Degas
1878
