Macbeth et les trois sorcières

Chassériau's Macbeth and the Three Witches (1855) engages Shakespeare as a source — a practice with a long history in French Romantic painting, from Géricault and Delacroix onward, as the revival of Shakespeare in France catalyzed the Romantic movement's rejection of neoclassical dramatic conventions. The Macbeth subject specifically offered the three witches on the heath as a vehicle for supernatural atmosphere and prophecy — the moment before the tragedy unfolds. On panel, suggesting a smaller-format or more intimate treatment, this work belongs to Chassériau's late Shakespearean subjects. The combination of Shakespeare with a palette informed by North African travel creates a distinctive atmospheric quality in Chassériau's literary subjects — the landscape is neither Scottish nor North African but an imagined space of dramatic intensity. The Louvre's holding situates this alongside his major works in the French national collection.

The supernatural subject requires Chassériau to create an atmosphere of uncanny foreboding through compositional and coloristic means: the heath landscape, the weird figures of the witches, and Macbeth's receptive presence. The panel support concentrates the effect in a relatively small format where the atmospheric qualities of his palette — warm darks, livid lights — can work with particular intensity.