Sleeping woman in antique dress is perhaps the most beautiful of the Museum’s Eckersberg paintings, but it is and remains just a fragment of a larger composition. In 1813 Eckersberg worked with two scenes from Ovid’s Metamorphoses that both had Alcyone as the main character. One of the paintings – now in the Danish National Gallery – depicts Alcyone waving goodbye to her spouse Ceyx, and the other was to have depicted the sleeping Alcyone, who in a dream receives the news that Ceyx has perished at sea. To enhance the lying down, main character’s unsettled and nightmarish sleep, Eckersberg placed a carefree dozing servant girl in the foreground. And she is the one depicted in the painting. Eckersberg was never satisfied with his work, and therefore decided to cut out and save the successful section with the servant girl. The fragment indicates that the artist did not add the finishing touches to his Alcyone painting before giving up. The floor, the plinth, which the servant girl is seated on, and her clothing are clearly not completed. But the girl’s heavy, resting head in the top left corner is perfectly and very beautifully finished.