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Henri Peinte
(1845-1912)
Orphée endormant Cerbère

This statue depicts Orpheus singing a lullaby to put the three-headed dog Cerberus, guardian of the Underworld, to sleep. (And yes, J. K. Rowling did steal the idea for the first Harry Potter book.) The first picture is cleaned up from a vintage sepia photo that I found on the internet - don’t you just love the angle on this one? The second picture is also a vintage shot, possibly taken in the artist’s studio - pity about the ugly wooden gate in the background. The final picture shows a bronze reproduction, by an amazing coincidence matching the angle of the first picture, and here, as all too often in reproduction bronzes, we see censorship rearing its ugly head and obscuring poor Orpheus’s finest asset.

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