Apollo and Midas

Hallé’s scene is taken from Book XI of Ovid’s Metamorphoses and shows the musical contest between Pan and Apollo, witnessed by King Midas of Phrygia and arbitrated by the mountain god Tmolus, shown here wreathed and cloaked in white. In the tale, Pan’s rustic music was ‘excelled by [the] beauty of Apollo's lyre’, who was consequently declared the winner (Ovid, Metamorphoses, B. More (ed.), Boston, 1922). This judgment ‘pleased all those present, all but Midas, who / blaming Tmolus called the award unjust’. Apollo, angered by the king’s delight in Pan’s ‘uncouth notes’, punished him by changing his ears into those of an ass. Hallé’s canvas, remaining faithful to its textual source, depicts the climax of the competition as the victorious Apollo languidly points towards the king, who clasps his hands to his head as his new ears emerge.

While Hallé worked across numerous genres, his primary output consisted of history paintings, and he received a number of royal commissions from Louis XV and Louis XVI for mythological scenes, which decorated the Palace of Versailles and Trianon. The artist revisited the subject of Apollo and Midas on a number of occasions, such as the version of similar dimensions now in the Palais des Beaux-Arts, Lille, on which this work is probably based.