David and Goliath

The story is the one from the Book of Samuel, the shepherd boy David against the Philistine giant Goliath, and this rough oil sketch is as far as Degas ever took it. He had started on the subject in pencil at the end of 1857, in Rome and Florence. In the same years he was drawing two famous Davids he found there, Bernini's marble in the Borghese gallery in Rome, caught in the middle of the throw, and Donatello's small bronze in Florence. Here nothing is polished. The tall figure in front lifts one arm high over his head, and the other stands far off across bare ground under a stormy blue sky. A label from the London dealers Arthur Tooth and Sons, still on the frame, dates the canvas to about 1864. Tooth showed it in 1956, and Captain Stanley Sykes, who seems to have bought it there, left it to the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge in 1966.