Andromache Mourning Hector

On the shaft of the lamp stand, in Greek letters, David painted lines from the twenty-fourth book of the Iliad: Andromache's lament that her husband died in the flower of his age and left her a widow in his palace with a son still a child. Look at the contrast between the rigid, sculptural corpse and the soft agitation of the two living figures, and at the reliefs carved on the side of the bed. The strong light from the left and the bare architecture show David, in 1783, moving toward the severe style of the Oath of the Horatii, which he would paint the following year.

David painted the canvas in Paris between April and August 1783 and presented it on the twenty-second of August as his reception piece for the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture, which made him a full academician. It was shown at the Salon that opened three days later. It remained in the Academy's rooms in the Louvre until that institution was abolished in August 1793, when it was seized by the revolutionary government and inventoried with the rest of the Academy's property. It belongs today to the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, which has placed it on deposit at the Louvre, so that David's first triumph as a history painter hangs among his later masterpieces.

Did You Know? The Greek lament painted on the lamp stand is a real quotation from the twenty-fourth book of the Iliad.