Q105346905

The 1900 date attached to this Scheffer canvas in the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Marseille is clearly a cataloguing anomaly: Ary Scheffer died in 1858, forty-two years before the recorded date. The figure is either the year of a donation, acquisition, or exhibition rather than production, or there has been a transcription error in the Wikidata record. The work itself is certainly by Scheffer and was made during his lifetime. The Marseille museum holds a broad collection of French academic and Romantic painting, and Scheffer's presence there reflects the wide regional distribution of his work through nineteenth-century museum acquisitions, Salon purchases, and donations from provincial collectors who admired his devotional and portrait paintings.

Without reliable dating, the technical analysis must rely on internal stylistic evidence. If the canvas belongs to his 1830s–1840s output, the paint will show the warm, restrained handling of his mature manner: controlled glazing, precise facial modelling, and the characteristic amber-toned shadows that give his work its introspective quality. Physical examination of the canvas and pigments would allow more precise dating.