The Descent from the Cross

In February 1864, six months after Delacroix died, everything left in his studio was sold at auction in Paris, and the drawings found there were stamped with his initials before the sale. The stamp went on wholesale, and some of the sheets it marked have since proved to be by other hands. This small Descent from the Cross passed through that sale. The Paris dealer Charles Sedelmeyer sold it in 1897 to Josiah Bradlee of Boston, whose bequest brought it to the museum in 1903 under Delacroix's name. Today the museum catalogues it as the work of a follower and dates it to the 1860s. It is oil worked over a pen-and-ink drawing on paper, later mounted on a wooden panel, and it measures just under half a metre across.