Der Marquis Ferdinand Mazzini ersticht Graf Hippolitus de Vereza, den Geliebten seiner Tochter Julie, im Hintergrund Julie und ihr Bruder Ferdinand c. 1790 - 1792

Christian Sambach made this dramatic scene of patricidal rage with pen and ink, and watercolor washes, sometime around the late 18th century. The choice of medium – relatively swift and economical – is well-suited to the artist's subject: a father’s fatal reckoning with his daughter’s lover. Sambach would have used his technical command to describe the unfolding story. Notice the fine hatching he uses to build the shading of the figures, and the way he indicates the voluminous folds of the clothing. While the artist surely spent considerable time on the composition, the actual execution of the drawing would have been quite rapid. The urgency of the narrative is legible in Sambach’s light, transparent, and unblended colors, all of which speaks to a culture in which draftsmanship was valued as a transportable skill, and as a medium of social commentary. The relative speed with which Sambach could produce a drawing like this makes it all the more remarkable, and asks us to question what we value in this time.