Joseph Anton Koch was pre-occupied throughout his life with illustrating episodes from Dante's Divine Comedy. Our drawing of Dante and Beatrice (Canto 2) and Virgil at the Gates of Hell (Canto 3) is both thematically and compositionally closely related to two drawings in the Akademie der bildenden Künste, Vienna, and in the Hessisches Landesmuseum, Darmstadt, both circa 1801-2. Our drawing, which is stylistically closer to the Darmstadt study, dates from this period when Koch is known to have produced a number of drawings of this theme. Although he was to design and execute frescoes in the Dante room in the Casino Massimo in 1825, the drawings of 1801 to 1805 were not used as preparatory drawings but, rather, referred to for inspiration.