Departure for the Sabbath [Départ pour le Sabbat] (1910)
by Albert Joseph Pénot (French, 1862–1930)
A woman launches herself into a dark sky on a broomstick, her body arched against the night, her expression unreadable — neither fearful nor triumphant, simply departing. The world below dissolves into Pénot's characteristic mist: shadow and suggestion, nothing solid enough to hold her.
Albert Joseph Pénot was a French painter whose work centered almost entirely on the female form. While his contemporaries filled their canvases with elaborate narrative scenes, Pénot stripped his compositions down to the figure itself — the surrounding world rendered in atmospheric haze, giving his subjects an uncanny isolation. His darker paintings, of which Départ pour le Sabbat is the most iconic, place women in the role of the sorceress: autonomous, airborne, and entirely beyond reach.
The Sabbath she departs for is her own.
Rectangle Canvas Wrap
Gallery-quality canvas with fade-resistant inks and a 1.25" deep pine frame sourced from renewable forests. Arrives wrapped and ready to hang.
- Materials: cotton and polyester composite canvas, pine wood frame
- Inner frame: radiata pine from renewable forests
- Leveling bumpers included for wall protection
- Ready to hang — mounting hardware pre-attached
Care: Dust gently with a clean, damp cloth as needed.