Pieta, first sketch

In 1840 Delacroix was asked for the first time to paint a religious scene straight onto a church wall. The church was Saint-Denys-du-Saint-Sacrement in the Marais in Paris, and the subject a Pietà, the dead Christ mourned by his mother and his friends. The chapel was very dark, and the mural was finished only in 1844. This small oil sketch, which the Louvre dates to 1843, belongs to that project. The museum links it to a little Pietà of 1837, whose group Delacroix would reverse on the chapel wall. The body lies across the laps of the women, two men bend over it, one in a flaring red cloak, and the sky is broken by yellow light. It was sold after his death in 1864 and reached the Louvre in 1942, bequeathed by the collector Armand Dorville.