Banquo's Ghost

Chassériau's Banquo's Ghost (1854), at the Museum of Fine Arts of Reims, takes one of the most dramatically charged scenes in Macbeth — the dinner scene where the ghost of the murdered Banquo appears to the guilty Macbeth, invisible to others, driving the king to frenzied behavior that reveals his guilt. Shakespeare's ghost scenes had fascinated French Romantic painters who valued the uncanny, the supernatural, and the psychologically extreme. Chassériau's treatment on panel creates an intimate-format image of the moment when the supernatural irrupts into the public social space of the royal banquet. The ghost painting as a genre required painters to decide how literally to render the apparition — as a clearly visible presence, a suggestion, or something that registers only through Macbeth's response. This interpretive choice is central to the painting's dramatic logic and psychological sophistication.

The banquet scene presents compositional challenges: a large company of seated figures, the eruption of supernatural presence, and the king's violent reaction must all be managed within a legible spatial organization. Chassériau's panel format concentrates the atmospheric effects that the ghostly subject demands — warm flesh tones against the unearthly pallor of the apparition — into an intimate scale.