Composition

The story of Saul and the Witch of Endor was a popular subject for melodramatic pictures in the 18th and early 19th centuries. This sketch by Whistler might have been his own invention or a copy of a work by another artist.

Benjamin West's painting Saul and the Witch of Endor (1777, Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, CT) was well known through numerous engravings, including an etching and engraving by William Sharp first published by John Boydell in 1788. Washington Allston's 1820 painting (Mead Art Museum at Amherst College) was engraved by Wagstaff & Andrews and others. In the UK, Charles Robert Leslie's Saul and the Witch of Endor raising the ghose of Samuel before Saul (1814) might possibly have been known to the young Whistler, who attended his lectures at the Royal Academy of Arts in 1849. 1