Ruin at Daphne is an oil painting on canvas by the American artist Edwin Dickinson (1891–1978). His major painting of the 1940s, the work occupied Dickinson between 1943 and 1953. The painting, which is in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, is an architectural fantasy in red and gray tones. History Ruin at Daphne was inspired by the Roman ruins that had impressed Dickinson while visiting Europe during 1937–38. It began as "a 60/48 of antique peristyle, villa of 1820 & pool," done from imagination and, after moving to New York in 1944, also from library research on Roman buildings. As he explained to his patron Esther Sawyer, it represented a decision to move away from the "less gay" subjects that had been the focus of his major studio paintings and to paint to enjoy himself as much as possible. Yet his interest in history was closely allied to his interest in memory, and Dickinson wanted to dedicate the picture to his brother Burgess (who committed suicide in 1913), an intention he had harbored long before the painting began. For the painting, Dickinson reused a canvas on which he had begun a self-portrait, which he scraped off and covered the remains with a red-brown paint. On this, he began a detailed perspective drawing in pencil that he modeled with three values of the red-brown paint. Although the architectural subject fascinated him, the formal concerns were primary in his mind. In 1945, he wrote to Sawyer, "The color (long since decided upon) and the composition are what it is to be about." He was excited about the challenge posed by having to invent the buildings, which permitted him compositional freedom to indulge in a complex interplay of form much like that permitted to a purely abstract painter, as well as a freedom to make multiple revisions of the arrangement. At the end of 1943, he had decided to title it Three Periods of Architecture in Provence; after realizing that in southern France, people were living in homes next to ancient Roman architecture and that the distant past was woven into their daily lives. At the beginning of 1946, he rechristened it Villa Chedanne in honor of Georges Paul Chedanne, a turn-of-the-century French architect who had an interest in Roman architecture. His revised idea was that his architectural invention represented a Roman ruin in Syria that Chedanne