The Portrait of Frédéric Chopin and George Sand was an 1838 unfinished

Unfinished work

An unfinished work is creative work that has not been finished. Its creator may have chosen never to finish it or may have been prevented from doing so by circumstances outside of their control such as death. Such pieces are often the subject of speculation as to what the finished piece would have...

 oil-on-canvas painting by French artist Eugène Delacroix

Eugène Delacroix

Ferdinand Victor Eugène Delacroix was a French Romantic artist regarded from the outset of his career as the leader of the French Romantic school...

. Originally a double portrait, it was later cut in two and sold off as separate pieces. It showed composer Frédéric Chopin

Frédéric Chopin

Frédéric François Chopin was a Polish composer and virtuoso pianist. He is considered one of the great masters of Romantic music and has been called "the poet of the piano"....

 (1810–49) playing piano while writer George Sand

George Sand

Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin, later Baroness Dudevant , best known by her pseudonym George Sand , was a French novelist and memoirist.-Life:...

 (1804–76) sits to his right, listening and sewing (a favorite activity of hers). The sitters were lovers at the time, and both were close friends of the artist.

The portrait remained in Delacroix's studio until his death. Shortly afterward, it was cut into two separate works, both of which are tightly focused. Chopin's portrait comprises only a head shot, while Sand's shows her upper body but is narrowly cut. This led to the loss of large areas of the original canvas. The reason for the divide is likely the then-owner's belief that two paintings would sell for a higher price than one. Today Chopin's portrait is housed at the Louvre

Louvre

The Musée du Louvre – in English, the Louvre Museum or simply the Louvre – is one of the world's largest museums, the most visited art museum in the world and a historic monument. A central landmark of Paris, it is located on the Right Bank of the Seine in the 1st arrondissement...

 in Paris, while Sand's hangs at Copenhagen

Copenhagen

Copenhagen is the capital and largest city of Denmark, with an urban population of 1,199,224 and a metropolitan population of 1,930,260 . With the completion of the transnational Øresund Bridge in 2000, Copenhagen has become the centre of the increasingly integrating Øresund Region...

's Ordrupgaard

Ordrupgaard

Ordrupgaard is a state-owned art museum situated near Jægersborg Dyrehave, north of Copenhagen, Denmark. The museum houses one of Northern Europe’s most considerable collections of Danish and French art from the19th and beginning of the 20th century....

 Museum.

George Sand was a French Romantic

Romanticism

Romanticism was an artistic, literary and intellectual movement that originated in the second half of the 18th century in Europe, and gained strength in reaction to the Industrial Revolution...

 novelist, one of the first female French writers to establish an international reputation. She become known for behavior unusual for a woman at the time, including openly conducting affairs

Romantic friendship

The term romantic friendship refers to both very close but non-sexual relationship and at times physical relationship between friends, often involving a degree of physical closeness beyond that which is common in modern Western societies, and may include for example holding hands, cuddling,...

, smoking a pipe and wearing men's clothing. Sand had been friends with Delacroix for a number of years, though the painter did not hold her work in high regard. She met Chopin in 1838 and conducted a relationship with him for ten years, until two years before he died. Though their relationship began as physical, Chopin's failing health in time changed her role to that of caregiver. Sand introduced Delacroix to Chopin in 1838, and the two men remained close friends.

The double portrait showed Chopin playing piano while Sand sat and listened. Little is known of the painting's origin or the circumstances of its execution. It is not known whether it was a commission or intended as a gift to the composer. It is known that Delacroix borrowed a piano so that the work could be painted in his studio. The double portrait was not finished, and ironically one of the elements that was not painted was the piano.

The Sand canvas is generally seen as the more interesting because, in its original form, it was intended as a counterpoint to the Chopin portrait, not as a stand-alone work. As such, it contravenes many conventions of portraiture. It was usual in 19th-century bust-sized paintings for the subject to be largely static, but here Sand is shown reacting to the music Chopin is playing, and highly animated and energetic in her emotional response.