Othello Hesitating to Kill Desdemona

baron François Gérard

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The plays of William Shakespeare (1564-1616) gained considerable popularity in France in the 1790s with the productions of Jean-François Ducis, a dramatist who staged a successful adaptation of Othello in Paris in 1792. François Gérard, one of Jacques Louis David’s most successful students, here tries out ideas for depicting the scene where the Moor Othello prepares to murder his sleeping wife, Desdemona after a malicious plot has convinced him that she has been unfaithful. In a vigorous and calligraphic ink line, Gérard experiments with variations on Desdemona’s pose in small sketches across the sheet. The verso of the sheet features a similar mix of studies for the same scene.

Drawings and Prints

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Department’s vast collection of works on paper comprises approximately 21,000 drawings, 1.2 million prints, and 12,000 illustrated books created in Europe and the Americas from about 1400 to the present day. Since its foundation in 1916, the Department has been committed to collecting a wide range of works on paper, which includes both pieces that are incredibly rare and lauded for their aesthetic appeal, as well as material that is more popular, functional, and ephemeral. The broad scope of the department’s collecting encourages questions of connoisseurship as well as those pertaining to function and context, and demonstrates the vital role that prints, drawings, and illustrated books have played throughout history.

Metropolitan Museum of Art