The Pearls of Aphrodite

What you are looking at

The canvas is tall and narrow, almost twice as high as it is wide, and Draper uses the height to stack the scene like a column. At the center, on a rock at the edge of a deep blue sea, stands Aphrodite. Her long red-gold hair is held by a gold band and streams down her back; a red cloak falls from her shoulders, and a white, transparent veil is knotted loosely at her hips. With her right hand she lifts a long string of pearls looped over her shoulder, looking down at it with half-closed eyes, absorbed in its glow.

Below and around her, others are busy bringing her treasure. At the lower left a dark-skinned attendant in a patterned wrap sits on the rock beside a young woman in lilac drapery, who reaches down toward the water. There, half submerged in the shadowy sea, a figure holds up a handful of pearls. On the right, sea nymphs rise from the water, one with a wreath of flowers in her hair holding up another strand of pearls toward the goddess. Behind everything, sheer golden cliffs rise into a strip of blue sky.

The detail worth finding is the way Draper handles the light. The goddess's skin is painted in pale, cool tones that make her seem lit from within, while the figures below her sink into the warmer shadows of the rock and sea, so she appears to rise out of them.

The myth and the subject

In Greek myth Aphrodite was born from the foam of the sea, and art since antiquity has linked her to shells, pearls and the ocean, as in Botticelli's The Birth of Venus. No ancient story describes this exact scene. Draper invented it, imagining the goddess receiving the treasures of the sea as tribute, an idea that fits her role as a sea-born deity of beauty and desire.

How Draper made it

Herbert James Draper (1863–1920) trained at the Royal Academy Schools and in Paris and Rome, and made his name with mythological pictures of the sea and its creatures, such as The Lament for Icarus (1898) and Clyties of the Mist. He combined academic figure drawing with a fascination for water, rock and light, and he often painted sea nymphs emerging from the waves. The Pearls of Aphrodite, dated 1907, belongs to the height of his career, and a separate oil study for the composition survives.

What does it mean?

The painting is a celebration of beauty in the late Victorian classical manner, more decorative than narrative. Pearls, formed in the sea and prized for their luster, were natural attributes for Aphrodite, and Draper multiplies them through the picture: the goddess's strand, the nymph's offering, the handful rising out of the water. The image can be read as a meditation on beauty admired and adored, with Aphrodite as both the object of everyone's devotion and absorbed in her own reflection.

Where is it today?

The present whereabouts of The Pearls of Aphrodite are not publicly recorded, and it is generally assumed to be in a private collection. Because Draper died in 1920, the image is in the public domain. For related works, see our mythology paintings and academic art collections.