Phaedre, Having Declared Her Passion, Attempts to Kill Herself with the Sword of Hippolytus

Anne-Louis Girodet de Roussy-Trioson · c. 1801

Medium

Pen and brush and black and brown wash and graphite, heightened with white gouache on cream laid paper

Original size

34.5 × 24.2 cm (13 5/8 × 9 9/16 in.)

Currently held

Art Institute of Chicago

Movement

Neoclassicism

This charged preparatory drawing captures one of classical drama's most devastating moments — Phaedra, consumed by forbidden love for her stepson Hippolytus, reaching for his sword in a gesture of shame and desperation that feels utterly immediate despite being two centuries old. Girodet de Roussy-Trioson trained under Jacques-Louis David but developed a far more emotionally volatile sensibility, blending Neoclassical discipline with an early Romantic intensity. This work, executed around 1801, demonstrates his extraordinary facility with wash and gouache — building deep shadow and ghostly highlights on cream laid paper to create figures that seem to pulse with theatrical light. The brushwork conveys both compositional rigour and raw psychological weight, qualities that set Girodet apart from his more austere contemporaries. The subject comes from Racine's 1677 tragedy Phèdre, a play that captivated French academic artists throughout the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as a vehicle for exploring moral catastrophe through the visual language of antiquity. Our hand-painted oil reproduction translates Girodet's expressive line and tonal drama into the richness of oil on canvas, preserving the scene's intensity while bringing warmth and depth to a work that rarely leaves the Art Institute of Chicago's study rooms.