Eugène Delacroix

The building boom of the 1830s saw a number of edifices completed in the early forties when the ambitious campaigns to decorate the interiors were undertaken. Delacroix was working on the Deputies Library at the Palais Bourbon from 1837-1848, during which time he was also engaged on the decoration of the Peers Library at the Palais du Luxembourg from 1841 until 1846. He was charged with decorating the cupola, pendentives, and half-dome above the apse. Delacroix executed paintings on canvas in his preferred mixture of oil and wax. The commission was less complicated than the Deputies Library, and he developed a program that blended allegory with a focus on four major poets, Homer, Virgil, Dante, and Ovid. This sheet combines studies for both projects around 1840.
In the left margin of the present sheet, Delacroix wrote a list of subjects to organize the seeming chaos of the variant sketches. The inscription, "inventeur de l'astronomie," suggests that the studies to the right of the center fold are the first ideas for a pendentive devoted to The Chaldean Shepherds, for his work on the Deputies Library at the Palais Bourbon (Johnson no. 547).
The studies on the left side of the sheet are for the decoration of the Peers Library at the Palais du Luxembourg. They relate to the half-dome painted on canvas in 1842, “Alexander Preserves Homer's Poems.” The figures at the left of the composition hold up the gold casket. Alexander is shown at right, seated and gesturing to the group, with two studies of the angel hovering above and the group of Roman soldiers to the right. Alexander's figure is repeated with a kneeling supplicant below. The head study may relate to one of the figures at right.
Although this drawing bears Delacroix's estate stamp (Lugt 838a), the sheet cannot be firmly identified in either of Delacroix's posthumous sales: Paris, Hôtel Drouot, 22-27 February 1864 or Paris, Hôtel Drouot, 21 April 1865.
The inscription on the verso suggests the drawing once belonged to Charles Gilbert, Vicomte Morel de Vindé (1759-1842). If that was the case, it confirms that the sheet dates before 1842, to the very start of Delacroix's thinking about the Luxembourg program, and that he parted with it while still working on the project and before Gilbert's death.