Baron François-Xavier Fabre
French, 1766-1837
Cléombrote and Léonidas
INV-1520
Baron François-Xavier Fabre
French, 1766-1837c. 1795
Cléombrote and Léonidas
Baron François-Xavier Fabre French, 1766-1837 →pen and ink drawingsdrawings (visual works)
Date
c. 1795
Medium
Pen and black and brown ink, with brush and brown wash and touches of blue gouache, over red chalk, heightened with white gouache, on blue laid paper, laid down on gray laid paper
Museum
Art Institute of Chicago
Location
Chicago, IL
Credit
Clarence Buckingham Collection
In the wake of the French Revolution, painting commissions were few, but polished drawings had a market. This work illustrates a scene from Plutarch’s series of biographies of famous men in which the Spartan king Léonidas spares the life of his traitorous son-in-law Cléombrote, exiling him from Sparta. After pleading for her husband’s life, the king’s daughter Chilonis departs with her banished husband and their two children.