#love

There's actual gold leaf on this, plus silver and platinum — his father was a gold engraver, it's said, so he knew the trade before he ever painted. When it first went on show it was listed under a plainer name, just 'lovers'.

One out of a huge cycle he kept adding to for decades — love, jealousy, death — built to hang together as a set rather than be met one at a time. He came back to two people kissing over and over, in paint and in prints, and from what I can find the two of them get harder to tell apart with every version.

It's the story where the lover only ever comes at night and she's forbidden to know who he is. Most painters gave her a beautiful boy; here, according to the museum, he's deliberately an awkward teenager very pleased with himself, taken partly from an old Greek poem that calls him a mean-spirited brat. Painted in exile in Brussels, after the empire he'd spent years working for collapsed.