A drawing of a group of figures, including the Virgin in a swoon, lamenting over the body of the dead Christ, before a sarcophagus and the open pedimented door of a square mausoleum.

Poussin painted the Lamentation or Entombment of Christ at least twice in his career, and canvases survive from the mid-1620s (Alte Pinakothek, Munich) and the mid-1650s (National Gallery of Ireland). The mood and setting of the present drawing is not unlike the Munich painting, but its style is that of the mid-late 1630s; the handling of the wash it is very similar to drawings such as Moses and the Daughters of Jethro (RCIN 911889). The absence of an associated painting and the degree of finish make it reasonable to assume that the drawing was produced as a finished work of art. But Poussin habitually made such careful drawings in his preparatory work for paintings, and the pen-work here is loose compared to Scipio Africanus and the pirates (RCIN 990698), which was certainly made as an independent piece.

A related sketch in the Metropolitan Museum in New York (Rosenberg & Prat 1994, no. 118) is in pen and ink only, but is also in Poussin's style of the mid-late 1630s, being close to such drawings as a study for Ordination in the Morgan Library (rejected by R&P, no. R663, but autograph). The Met drawing also features a pair of crosses in the left distance, and has the same form of tomb, with the two mourners above the tomb reversed, but the group around the Virgin is quite different. Poussin took the figure of the Virgin in the present composition from a sixteenth-century engraving copying a print by Enea Vico, itself after a design by Raphael (Bartsch XV, p.284, 8-copy).

The drawing possibly came from an album entitled Poussin, Le Sueur &c. inventoried in the Royal Library around 1800, but the earlier history of that album is unknown. The sheet is in much worse condition than any of the Poussin sheets from either the Massimi or Cassiano dal Pozzo albums, having suffered from extensive paper losses (ineptly patched at an unknown date) and damp, which has yellowed the paper and weakened the darkest passages of wash.