Elaine de Kooning’s Bacchus (1982) is one of the larger canvases from the series that occupied her from 1976 to about 1983. Comprising more than sixty paintings and works on paper, the series marks the beginning of her experimentation with acrylic paint. Most examples that reach the market are small panels or works on paper; at seven feet tall, this painting shows the series at full scale.

The source was Jules Dalou’s Triumph of Silenus, a nineteenth-century bronze in Paris’s Jardin du Luxembourg depicting the companion of Bacchus, the Roman god of wine. De Kooning sketched it on many visits, at different times of day, recording how light shifted across its twisting figures. Here the bronze dissolves into strokes of cobalt, violet, and pale gray-blue against acid green, flecked with yellow. Dark navy lines pick out limbs and torsos as the slumped god is borne up by his companions.

De Kooning began the large canvases as Lamar Dodd Visiting Professor at the University of Georgia (1976–78) and returned to them for six years. Critic Lawrence Campbell compared the series to Claude Monet’s paintings of Rouen Cathedral. Acquired directly from the artist’s estate and never before on the market, Bacchus is a rare chance to own a major canvas from her most ambitious late series.