Object Image

"Away!": plate 7 from Othello (Act 3, Scene 4)

In 1844 Eugène Piot commissioned the young Chassériau to prepare fifteen illustrations to Shakespeare's Othello. Inspired by a series of ground-breaking Hamlet lithographs that Delacroix had created one year earlier, the younger artist opted for the more linear technique of etching. His expressive conception of form had been learned in Ingres's studio then developed under Delacroix. In the series, key exchanges offer a compressed summary of much of the play, with a final cluster devoted to the tragic conclusion. Here, taken in by a ruse devised by the villainous Iago, Othello accuses Desdemona of infidelity as her faithful attendant Emilia watches with disbelief.

Credit: Harris Brisbane Dick F...

Etched 1844, reprinted 1900
Etching, engraving, roulette, drypoint, and aquatint or sulphur tint on chine collé; second edition (gazette des beaux-arts)
26.2 x 36.5cm
32.7.9
Image and text © Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2019

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The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Permanent collection