As recounted in Ovid’s Metamorphoses (Book III), the hunter Actaeon stumbled upon the goddess of the chase Diana and her nymphs bathing in a woodland pool. Outraged at being seen naked, Diana transformed Actaeon into a stag, and he was torn apart by his own hounds. The subject was painted by Titian in one of his late mythological canvases, formerly in the collection of the 7th Earl of Harewood. Having been on loan at the National Gallery, London, for several years, Titian’s painting was withdrawn for auction in June 1971, when it was bought by the J. Paul Getty Museum in California. The National Gallery had already launched a public appeal to save the painting for the nation, and the export licence was delayed, allowing the Gallery to purchase the painting the following year. One of the fund-raising events was a ballet devised by Dickie Buckle and mounted at the London Coliseum on 22 June 1971. Buckle invited many artists to design variations on Titian’s painting, which were enlarged to make drop-curtains for the ballet; besides Rosoman, contributors included Duncan Grant, John Piper, Patrick Procktor, Ceri Richards, Robert Medley and Keith Vaughan. As recounted by Buckle:

‘In 1959 I spent a couple of weeks at Harewood House with Leonard Rosoman and Astrid Zydower ... We were preparing the new exhibition rooms in Sir William Chambers’ stable block. Leonard fell in love - not with Astrid or me, but with Titian’s ‘Diana’, then hanging in the Green Drawing Room. So when I talked to him in mid-March 1971 about saving the Titian, he said he would do anything in the world to help. Rosoman’s elaborate gouache was delivered early in May and sent straight to Alick Johnstone’s. He had superimposed old on new. A modern lady toxophilist in all her kinky trappings, beside a bathing pool in a sports stadium with rows of targets, had shot her defiant bolt at Peeping Tom: yet around the metamorphosis of Actaeon a change of lighting, time and place was happening, as if a gauze curtain of history, painted with a verdure of tapestried woods, were descending to shift the scene back into the ancient world. It was a very subtle picture, carried out in a typical Rosoman colour-scheme of green and orange.

Rosoman was born in London, and after studies at the Edward VII School of Art at Durham University and the Royal Academy Schools, he was appointed a War Artist to the Admiralty in 1943. He later taught at various schools of art, including the Royal College of Art from 1957 to 1978, where one of his students was the young David Hockney. Rosoman’s crisply drawn works often deal with menacing or violent themes - sometimes overt, as here, but more often evident in a composition’s unsettling details. His study for the Death of Actaeon is typically idiosyncratic, the cartoon-like dogs and swimming nymphs contrasting with the terrible goddess rearing out of the pool and pointing a heavy gauntlet at the doomed hunter.

Signed, lower left Leonard Rosoman

Text adapted from Holbein to Hockney: Drawings from the Royal Collection