Ferdinand-Victor-Eugène Delacroix Charenton-Saint-Maurice 1798-1863 Paris

Bears the Delacroix studio stamp (L.838)

A. Robaut, L'oeuvre complet de Eugène Delacroix, Paris 1885, no. 1064;
M. Sérullaz, Mémorial de l'Exposition Eugène Delacroix, Paris 1963, p. 303, under cat. no. 400;
idem., Musée du Louvre...Dessins d'Eugène Delacroix, Paris 1984, vol. I, p. 221,  under cat. no. 476;
L. Johnson, The Paintings of Eugène Delacroix, Oxford 1986, vol. III, p. 154, under cat. no. 337

Laid down. General condition quite good, some very slight surface dirt at the top edge and right edge of the drawing. Chalk quite fresh. Drawing is sold mounted and framed in a french carved and gilded frame
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This is a preparatory study for Delacroix's painting, signed and dated 1860, now in the Ordrupgaard Museum, Copenhagen.¹  A preliminary study in pen and ink, in the Louvre, is quite close to the present drawing, and shows similar variations from the final painting.²  It seems that Delacroix had already read and translated Canto XXXIII of Dante's Inferno as early as 1819, but he first mentions working on a picture of the subject in 1847 and again in 1849, 1850 and 1856.  The painting in Copenhagen was completed for the dealer Estienne by June 1860, and is the only surviving version, although there is some evidence that another earlier one may once have existed.³

The famous Canto, which describes Count Ugolino della Gherardesca, a Guelph leader, locked in a tower with his two sons and two grandsons to starve to death, was a very popular subject with French artists of the nineteenth century.  

1.  Fig. 1;  see Lee Johnson, op. cit., vol. IV, reproduced pl. 158

2.  See M. Serullaz, op.cit., 1984, cat. no. 476, reproduced 

3. See L. Johnson, vol. III, loc. cit.