The encounter with Paris’s artistic treasures overwhelmed Eckersberg, who wrote in in a letter home in November 1811 that he was suffering from an inferiority complex. A year later he wrote to say that he now felt he was a member of the artistic scene. Oedipus and Antigone may have contributed to this new self-confidence. The work was one of his greatest challenges hitherto, and he succeeded for instance in using the interplay of the light with strategically placed features to create spatiality.