Andromache Mourning Hector

David presented the large Andromache in August 1783 as his reception piece for the French royal academy. It got him elected the following year, and that canvas is in the Louvre. This is the small oil he worked the design out on, 58 centimetres high, with the arrangement already settled, Hector laid out dead, Andromache beside him and their small son Astyanax at her knee. Ten years later the academy no longer existed. David had helped abolish it, was sitting as a deputy in the Convention, and had voted for the execution of the king whose academy had taken him in. The sketch was entered in the Pushkin Museum's books in April 1927.