Jeune fille pleurant sur une stèle

This 1840 canvas depicts a young woman weeping over a stele — a carved stone funerary marker — a subject drawn from ancient Greek funerary art and literary sources. The motif of the mourning woman at a tomb was a staple of neoclassical painting, borrowed from Greek relief sculpture and the tragic drama, and Chassériau's early engagement with it reflects his formation in a tradition that treated ancient Greece as a moral and aesthetic model. The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts holds this work as part of its collection of French nineteenth-century painting. The use of the stele — a specifically Greek rather than Roman or Christian funerary object — signals the neoclassical source of the subject and Chassériau's early commitment to antique imagery.

The composition is concentrated on the single figure in relation to the stone stele, the young woman's body organised in a posture of grief that echoes Greek sculptural prototypes. Chassériau's handling at this early date shows careful, Ingres-influenced modelling — the face and figure drawn with linear precision before paint is applied. The stone of the stele is rendered with appropriate material hardness against the softness of the figure.