Medea Killing Her Children

Unknown artist · 1777-1827

Medium

Pen and black ink with brush and brown wash, heightened with white gouache, on cream wove paper

Original size

17.4 × 15.2 cm (6 7/8 × 6 in.)

Currently held

Art Institute of Chicago

Movement

Rococo

Few subjects tested an artist's nerve quite like this one — Medea, suspended at the edge of the most terrible act in classical tragedy, rendered here with the precision and restraint of academic draughtsmanship. Created by an unknown hand between 1777 and 1827, the work belongs to a period when European artists were returning obsessively to the mythology of ancient Greece, drawn by its psychological extremity as much as its narrative grandeur. The technique is exacting: pen and black ink layered with brush-applied brown wash, then lifted with white gouache highlights on cream wove paper — a method that gives the scene an almost sculptural weight despite working entirely on two dimensions. Rather than softening the subject through colour, the artist uses tonal contrast alone, letting gesture and shadow carry what pigment might have overdone. Euripides' Medea had never left the European stage and was experiencing a notable revival in late 18th-century theatre, which drew painters and draughtsmen back repeatedly to this moment of grief colliding with fury. Now held in the permanent collection of the Art Institute of Chicago, the work's controlled intensity survives in our hand-painted oil reproduction, which translates the original's tonal precision onto canvas while preserving the charged stillness at its heart.