[AC] Mead Art Museum at Amherst College; [HC] Hampshire College Art Gallery;
[HD] Historic Deerfield; [MH] Mount Holyoke College Art Museum; [MH SK] The Joseph Allen Skinner Museum at Mount Holyoke College; [SC] Smith College Museum of Art; [UM] University Museum of Contemporary Art at UMASS Amherst

Label Text:
The richly layered myth of Eos and Kephalos raises themes of longing, deception, fidelity, guilt, and suicide. The scene depicted on this elegant amphora shows only the beginning of the complex story. Here, noble Kephalos, married to an Athenian princess, is captured by the lustful goddess of dawn, Eos, while hunting in the woods. He wears the cloak and sunhat of an outdoorsman and has his trusty hound by his side. After living with Eos for several years, Kephalos, who never stopped pining for his wife, convinces the goddess to let him return home. The story takes many twists and turns, and ends with his wife’s accidental death at Kephalos’s hands and the hero’s remorseful suicide.
PR, 2013

Tags:
vases; design; narrative; figures

Link to share this object record:
https://museums.fivecolleges.edu/detail.php?t=objects&type=ext&id_number=AC+1941.23

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