Andromache Mourning Hector (preparatory drawing)

This Andromache Mourning Hector is a preparatory drawing by Jacques-Louis David in black chalk with stumping and grey wash, signed David in pen and brown ink at lower left and measuring about 32.4 × 24.1 cm (12 3/4 × 9 1/2 in); it was offered at Sotheby's New York in the Old Master Drawings sale of January 2015.

The drawing belongs to David's work on his reception piece for the Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture. The finished painting, 275 × 203 cm and signed L. David 1783, was presented in August 1783 and won him admission to the Academy; it belongs to the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts, which received it in 1886 from David's grandson Jules David-Chassagnol, and hangs on long-term loan in the Louvre. The subject comes from Homer's Iliad: Andromache, in white, sits beside the bed on which lies the body of her husband Hector, killed by Achilles, while their young son Astyanax tries to comfort her. Hector's crested helmet and sword lie on the floor, and drapery hangs behind the bed.

Sotheby's catalogue relates the sheet to the other known drawings for the project but notes that it differs from them and from the final canvas in several details: the position of Astyanax's left hand, Andromache's bare left arm and breast, and the fall of the drapery over her chair and legs. The same differences appear in David's 1783 oil sketch of the composition in the Pushkin Museum, Moscow. The cataloguers therefore suggest that this is the last preparatory study on paper, drawn just before the oil sketch, with the remaining changes made on the large canvas itself. The drawing was once owned by Jules Boilly, was sold in Paris in 1869 and again at the Hôtel Drouot in 1983, and is catalogued by Rosenberg and Prat in their 2002 catalogue raisonné of David's drawings.