Chryses Imploring the Help of Apollo, from Iliad, Book I

Prints and Drawings

1765/66

Johan Tobias Sergel
Swedish, 1740-1814

This drawing by Sweden’s most important Neoclassical sculptor and draftsman depicts a scene from Homer’s Iliad, set during the Trojan War.
In the drawing, Chryses, a Trojan priest of Apollo, prays to Apollo for help after Agamemnon, the leader of the Greek army, has refused to return his kidnapped daughter. In response, Apollo inflicts a plague upon the Greeks. Agamemnon returns Chryses’s daughter, but demands Chryses’s second kidnapped daughter, who is held by Achilles, in exchange.

Status: Currently Off View
Department: Prints and Drawings

Artist: Johan Tobias Sergel
Title: Chryses Imploring the Help of Apollo, from Iliad, Book I
Place: Sweden (Artist's nationality:)
Date Dates are not always precisely known, but the Art Institute strives to present this information as consistently and legibly as possible. Dates may be represented as a range that spans decades, centuries, dynasties, or periods and may include qualifiers such as c. (circa) or BCE.: Made 1765–1766
Medium: Black chalk on off-white laid paper, tipped onto wove paper
Inscriptions: No inscriptions recto; signed verso, l.r., brown ink, "Sergell"
Dimensions: 43.3 × 34.8 cm (17 1/16 × 13 3/4 in.)
Credit Line: Gift of Richard and Mary L. Gray
Reference Number: 2019.886
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Harald Brising, “Sergels teckningar till Homerus och Virgilius,” Tidskrift för konstvetenskap, nos. 1–2 (1917), pp. 138–44, pls. 1–2.
Harald Brising, “Sergels teckningar till Homerus och Virgilius,” in Harald Brising and August Hahr, Antik och nyantik (n.p., 1921), pp. 374–75, fig. 283.
Oscar Antonsson, Sergels ungdom och Romtid (Norstedts förlag, 1942), p. 83.
Ragnar Josephson, Sergels fantasi (Natur och Kultur, 1956), vol. 1, pp. 71–72, 330 n. 71; pls. 69–70.

Art Institute of Chicago, Shockingly Mad: Henry Fuseli and the Art of Drawing, 2017–18 (no cat.).
The Art Institute of Chicago, “Pure Drawing: Seven Centuries of Art from the Gray Collection”, January 25 - May 10, 2020, p. 68, cat. 37, p. 138, GC 71.

Sale, Bukowski’s, Stockholm, Sept. 27, 1916, lot 73 (incorrect image). Sold by Henry Avar (born 1954), Paris, through François Borne to the Gray Collection Trust, Chicago, Apr. 9, 2012 [Stockholms Auktionsverk, Dec. 7, 2011, lot 1943]; given to the Art Institute of Chicago, 2019.

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