Orphan Girl at the Cemetery

Orphan Girl at the Cemetery (Jeune orpheline au cimetière) is an oil painting on canvas by Eugène Delacroix, made in late 1823 or early 1824 and now in the Musée du Louvre, Paris (RF 1652); it measures about 65.5 × 54.3 cm.

Delacroix painted it while preparing The Massacre at Chios, his large canvas on the killing and enslavement of the inhabitants of Chios during the Greek War of Independence. In his journal for 17 February 1824 he mentions a young beggar woman who had posed for his study in the cemetery. Unusually for a history painter of the time, he worked directly from the living model. The same face appears, with closed eyes, at the left edge of the finished Massacre. The picture has long been described as a preparatory study for that painting, but it is also regarded as a work in its own right, and it was exhibited at the Salon of 1824 under the simple title Étude, alongside the Massacre.

The girl sits in front of a darkening graveyard with black crosses, fallen white headstones and cypresses on the horizon. She turns her head sharply and looks up at something outside the picture, her eyes wide and wet with tears, her mouth slightly open; her dress has slipped from her shoulder and her hand lies limply on her thigh. Delacroix contrasts precise drawing and firm contours against the background with fine brushwork for the skin and much freer strokes for the clothing, while the cold, dull colours of the dress and sky reinforce the mood of loss.

The painting first belonged to Delacroix's boyhood friend Frédéric Leblond and then to his widow, passed to a relative named Gebauer, and was bought in 1904 by the painter and collector Étienne Moreau-Nélaton, who gave it to the Louvre in 1906. It spent the years 1907–1934 at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs before returning to the Louvre.