Achilles Receiving in his Tent the Envoys of Agamemnon

This small panel, about 25 by 32 centimetres, is the sketch Ingres painted in 1801 while working out his entry for the Prix de Rome, the French state prize for young painters. The figures are still quick and loose. Achilles sits at the left with his lyre, and the envoys of Agamemnon, sent to coax him back into the war against Troy, come in from the right, several of them posed after ancient statues. Almost a century later the painter Edgar Degas, a lifelong admirer of Ingres, got the sketch from a Paris dealer in 1898 by trading one of his own drawings for it. After Degas died, his collection went under the hammer in Paris on 26 and 27 March 1918, days after German long-range guns had begun shelling the city. The sketch fetched 10,800 francs, and in 1919 the Friends of the Nationalmuseum gave it to Stockholm.