Jacques-Louis David

For Album 10:
Jules David (L.1437) and Eugène David (L.839),
David sale, Paris, 17 April 1826, part of lot 66 (unsold);
David sale, Paris, 11 March 1835, lot 16;
sale, Paris, 4-5 April 1836, part of lot 164;
Paris, M. Chassagnole, 1860;
Paris, Jules David, 1882;
Paris, Marquis and Marquise de Ludre,
their sale, Paris, Galerie Charpentier, 15 March 1956, part of lot 11 (unsold),
by descent to Marquise du Lau d'Allemans and Comtesse de Chaumont-Quitry,
from whom bought by Germain Seligman, Jacques Seligman and Co., New York, by whom the album was dismembered;
This drawing:
sale, London, Christie's, 7 July 1959, part of lot 47(2), purchased by Ralph Holland

Newcastle, 1960, no. 45

A. Sérullaz, Musée du Louvre...Dessins de Jacques-Louis David..., Paris 1991, p. 83, under no. 49;
P. Rosenberg and L.-A. Prat, Jacques-Louis David 1748-1825, Catalogue raisonné des dessins, Milan 2002, vol. I, p. 676, no. 1022, reproduced (as Dionysus and the Eumenides)

This is a copy after an antique relief in the Giustiniani Collection, which David would have visited in Rome. 

Pentheus was a king of Thebes.  He violently disapproved of the Bacchic cult, but was tempted to watch its rites.  He was discovered by his mother, Agave, and his aunts, who in their fury dismembered him.  The story is told by Euripides in The Bacchae and his account is quite accurately shown here: 'Possessed of Bacchus... his left arm she clutched in both her hands, and set against the wretch's ribs her foot, and tore his shoulder out...'¹

See note to lot 345 for an account of David's Album 10, from which this drawing also comes.

1.  P.P. Bober and R. Rubinstein, Renaissance Artists and Antique Sculpture, London 1986, p. 120-21, no. 87 (the story and quotation given in a description of a different sarcophagus)