Delacroix was the leading exponent of Romanticism in French painting. He was trained by the Neo-classical painter Pierre Guérin, from 1816 to about 1823. Guérin also taught Géricault.
Delacroix first exhibited at the Salon in 1822. In style his work shows the influence of painters he had studied, notably Rubens. He was an admirer of English painting, and visited England in 1825. In 1832 he travelled to Spain, Morocco and Algiers. After the Revolution of 1830 he was favoured by Louis-Philippe, and later by Napoleon III, with a long series of official commissions, beginning in 1833 with a series of decorations in the Palais Bourbon.
Delacroix exhibited at the Salon for the last time in 1859, showing Ovid among the Scythians.
Eugène Delacroix
1798 - 1863
Paintings by Eugène Delacroix
This lively and engaging portrait shows Abel Widmer (1805–1838), a pupil at the Institution Saint-Victor, a secondary school for boys in Paris. It was probably painted around 1824, the year Widmer won the school’s annual prize. It is most likely the first of a series of ten portraits of the prize...
Not on display
Delacroix depicts a moment from the Crucifixion, recounted in the Gospel of John (19: 25–30), when Christ speaks to his mother, the Virgin Mary, and one of his disciples, John, just before he dies. Christ’s mother, dressed in blue and yellow robes, collapses into the arms of Mary Cleophas and Joh...
Not on display
Delacroix painted this portrait of fellow artist, Louis-Auguste Schwiter (1805–1899), in the early years of their lifelong friendship. Not only was this Delacroix’s first full-length portrait, but it also reveals the close attention he paid to work by British artists such as Thomas Gainsborough (...
In AD 8 the Roman poet Ovid, author of the poem Metamorphoses, was banished for life by the Emperor Augustus to the port of Tomis on the coast of the Black Sea. At that time, this region was inhabited by the Scythians, nomadic warrior-tribes who originally came from the area now known as southern...
Not on display