The red chalk sketches described in the 1863 catalogue of the Fodor Museum as “a woman washing” actually turn out to be preliminary studies for Benouville’s painting Un prophète de Juda ayant désobé à Dieu est tué par un lion A Prophet of Judah Killed by a Lion for Defying God (location unknown). This history painting was exhibited at the 1855 Paris Exposition, together with other successful works by the artist. After the Benouville sale in 1859 it passed into the hands of E.L. Jacobson, a Rotterdam collector.

The Fodor sheet was identified as a sketch for the Prophet Judah on the basis of the seven preliminary studies for that painting published in Aubrun’s oeuvre catalogue. A “première pensée” was auctioned along with the painting at the Benouville sale, but it too has disappeared. Three studies now in Rouen helped to clarify the subject of the Amsterdam drawing. Two of them are of a woman in a similar pose, while the third is a compositional sketch in which the kneeling woman also appears. It is not clear whether that sketch is of the entire composition or only a detail.

The painting depicts the Biblical episode recounted in Kings 1:13, which was reproduced in the Salon catalogue of 1855: “and when he was gone, a lion met him by the way, and slew him: and his carcase was cast in the way, and the ass stood by it; the lion also stood by the carcase. And behold, men passed by, and saw the carcase cast in the way, and the lion standing by the carcase: and they came and told it to the city where the old prophet dwelt.”

The two sketches on the Fodor sheet must have been studies for one of the passers-by who found the body of the prophet, who had been killed when he defied God and returned by the road he had used on his outward journey. The woman in the sketches is evidently kneeling beside the prophet’s body and lifting up his robe. Lamme, the author of the 1863 catalogue, may have been misled in his description by the washerwomen in the following watercolor (see TA 10940).