Macbeth: the apparition of the kings

This 1857 wood panel depicting the apparition of the kings from Macbeth was produced just two years after Chassériau's death, making its posthumous dating uncertain — it may have been completed in his final years or left in studio. The scene from Shakespeare's Macbeth shows Macbeth confronted by the procession of future kings shown to him by the witches, a vision of dynastic succession that torments him. Chassériau brought to this Shakespearean subject the same fusion of literary seriousness and pictorial richness that characterised his engagement with Byron and Ariosto. The Louvre holds this panel among its extensive holdings of his work. The supernatural quality of the subject — ghostly apparitions in a theatrical darkness — suited Chassériau's atmospheric, psychologically engaged later manner.

The panel support and the supernatural subject suggest a deliberately intimate, private register — this is a concentrated investigation of an atmospheric, psychologically intense moment. The apparitional figures require handling that conveys their uncanny, spectral quality, achieved through softened edges and restrained colour rather than sharp neoclassical precision.