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Dimensions: 35 by 44.5cm., 13¾ by 17½in.

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Provenance: Estate of the artist
Probably, sale: Hôtel Drouot, Paris, 17 February 1864, lot 26
Collection Piron
Sale: Hôtel Drouot, Paris, 21 April 1865, lot 7
Galerie Durand-Ruel, Paris
Adolph Lewisohn, New York
Samuel Lewisohn, New York
Margaret Lewisohn, New York
A gift from the above to Frances and John L. Loeb
Sale: The John and Frances L. Loeb Collection, Christie's, New York, 12 May 1997, lot 108
Purchased at the above sale by the present owner

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Exhibited:

Chicago, The Art Institute, Loan Exhibition of Paintings, Watercolours, Drawings and Prints by Eugène Delacroix, 1798-1863, 1930, no. 14 (illustrated in the catalogue)
New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art , The Lewisohn Collection , 1951, no. 24 (illustrated in the catalogue)

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Literature: Probably, Alfred Robaut, L'Oeuvre Complet de Eugène Delacroix, Paris, 1885, p. 220, no. 848
S. Bourgeois, The Adolph Lewisohn Collection of Modern French Paintings and Sculpture, New York, 1928, p. 17; pp. VII & 16, illustrated
R. Escholier, Delacroix, Peintre, Graveur, Ecrivain, Paris, 1929, vol. III, p. 288, illustrated p. 63
L.R. Borrolatto, L'opera pittorica completa di Delacroix, Milan, 1972, p. 110, no. 411, illustrated
The Frances and John L. Loeb Collection, London, 1982, no. 54, illustrated

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Notes: Painted in 1843-1844.

The present work is a study for a commission that Delacroix was awarded in 1833 to decorate the ceiling of the library of the Assemblé Nationale in the Palais Bourbon, Paris. One of his first large-scale public murals, Delacroix ambitiously designed twenty-two subjects to fill the forty-two metre long ceiling composed of five cupolas in a row and two-domes.

The present work is one of four studies that he painted for the third pendentive of the first cupola in the north end of the library. On 31 January 1848, Delacroix described the subject in his journal as: 'Hesiode endormi. La Muse, suspendue sur ces lèvres, et sur son front, lui inspire des chants divins' (quoted in Lee Johnson, The Paintings of Eugène Delacroix, Oxford, 1989, vol. V, p. 76).

Delacroix's original solution to the selection and organisation of subject matter for the ceiling mural was to divide the paintings in the five cupolas into themes of Science, History and Philosophy, Legislation and Eloquence, Theology and Poetry. Hesiode et la Muse was dedicated to poetry.