Elaine de Kooning’s Bacchus (1974–1982) is believed to be the first painting she completed in the Bacchus series, which grew to more than sixty paintings and works on paper. It is also one of the largest. Most examples that reach the market are small panels or works on paper; this canvas stands seven feet tall.

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. Most later Bacchus canvases were painted in acrylic in her East Hampton studio; this one is in oil. Its tangle of figures glows in ochre, honey, and pale flesh tones, cut through with violet, cobalt, and sky blue against bursts of green. Thinned paint drips down the cream ground.

Critic Lawrence Campbell compared the series to Claude Monet’s paintings of Rouen Cathedral, another long study of one subject under changing light. Acquired directly from the artist’s estate, this painting has never been on the market.

De Kooning’s nephew Clay Fried was beside her in early summer 1974 when she first saw the sculpture and began sketching it in watercolor. He recalls discussing this oil in her New York studio that fall: “It seemed huge to me.” Signed ’82, the year she finished it, Bacchus is where the series began on canvas.