Frontispiece, from Othello

Théodore Chassériau|William Shakespeare

1900 · Etching, engraving, roulette, drypoint on chine collé · Drawings and Prints

In 1844 Eugène Piot commissioned the young Chassériau to prepare fifteen illustrations to Shakespeare's Othello. Inspired by a series of ground-breaking Hamlet lithographs that Delacroix had created one year earlier, the younger artist opted for the more linear technique of etching. His expressive conception of form had been learned in Ingres's studio then developed under Delacroix. In the series, key exchanges offer a compressed summary of much of the play, with a final cluster devoted to the tragic conclusion. This frontispiece, centered on a figure resembling the tragic muse Melpomene, was added when the series was reissued in the Gazette des Beaux-Arts in 1900.

Artist

Théodore Chassériau|William Shakespeare

Date

1900

Medium

Etching, engraving, roulette, drypoint on chine collé

Department

Drawings and Prints

Credit line

Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1932