The Murder Of Desdemona

In March and again in June 1866, the young critic Émile Zola reviewed a new French translation of Shakespeare's complete works in the Paris daily L'Événement. French audiences had loved Othello since the Romantic years, through Rossini's opera and the paintings of Delacroix, and the Courbet catalogue raisonné suggests those articles may have turned Courbet to the play that year. He took a picture of a sleeping nude that he had painted years before and still kept in his studio, and added the Moor. Othello leans over her in a white turban, about to smother her, while she lies on the white sheets unaware. Courbet never signed the canvas. It first appears on record at a Paris auction of his works in December 1881, four years after his death.