Endymion

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Diana, the Roman goddess of the moon, swoops down to kiss the sleeping shepherd Endymion. Having fallen in love with him at first sight, Diana begged her father Jupiter to preserve the mortal man, which he did by casting him into a state of endless sleep.

Watts painted a smaller version of this subject in the 1860s. In this later work, as Mary Watts recorded, Watts made the ‘composition more visionary and mystical… [making] the moon goddess only luminously visible’.