Studies for Torquato Tasso in the madhouse and other figures

This drawing was made in preparation for the painting of Tasso in the madhouse at the Ospedale di Sant'Anna in Ferrara, painted in 1839 (and not accepted at the Salon), now in the Oskar Reinhart Collection ‘Am Römerholz’ in Winterthur (inv. 1919.1; see Stuffmann, op. cit., 2008, no. 15, ill.). Here, the poet, seated in the pose of a thinker, takes on the persona of a hero confined to the asylum, who has to endure the eccentricities of the insane in a cell next to his own, visible through the bars of an opening. An earlier painted version of this picture was exhibited at the Salon of 1834 (without number) and is more finished, quite different in composition. In it, the other inmates are depicted full-length in the same room, just behind Tasso (private collection; see ibid., no. 5, ill.). Another pen study with numerous annotations and in a style very similar to the present sheet is also related to the the earlier painting, and is in the Musée du Louvre, Paris (inv. R.F. 31775; see ibid., no. 15b, ill.).