This drawing takes its subject from a scene in E. T. A. Hoffmann’s story about an artist, The Jesuit Church in Glogau, published in 1816 in Volume 1 of his Nachtstücke (Night Pieces). Hoffmann had studied in the Lower Silesian city of Glogau, where he met the painter Alexander Molinari, who was carrying out renovation work in the Jesuit church at the time. In Hoffmann’s tale, the narrator sees the painter Bertold working in the church one night by torchlight and offers to help him. The two became engrossed in a discussion on art. In answer to the question whether he did not consider himself destined to a higher calling, the painter answers: “Are you familiar with the fable of Prometheus, who wanted to be the creator, and stole the fire from heaven in order to make his dead figures come alive?” By pointing out Prometheus’s hubris, he alludes to a dark crime in his own past. The next day, the narrator learns that the painter once loved a princess, whom he had saved in the revolution and ultimately married, but that, once this happened, his artistic energy dried up, whereupon he rid himself of his family. Whether he murdered them or not remains untold. Eugène Delacroix portrays the conversation in an eerie, monochrome play of light and shadow. In its treatment, this work assumes a singular place among Delacroix’s watercolors and drawings.
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