François Victor Eloi Biennourry won the Prix de Rome in 1842. In 1845, while a boarder at the École de France in Rome, he painted Salmacis, his second compulsory submission to the
the École des Beaux-Arts. The painting, first exhibited in April 1845 at the Villa Medici and then in June of the same year at the Beaux-Arts, is now in the Musée d’Art et d’Histoire de Chaumont. Our sheet is a preparatory study for the figure of the Ovidian naiad.