Eugène Delacroix: 9 works

'Eugène Delacroix displayed his skill at depicting a literary subject on a small scale. A brilliant colorist, Delacroix used rich shades of greens, browns, blues, and reds and scraped the paper in some areas to achieve certain textures and highlights.'

'Eugene Delacroix heard the legendary Italian violinist and composer Nicolo Paganini play at the Paris Opera on March 9, 1831, and painted the small, full-length portrait of the virtuoso a short time later. Contemporary accounts, confirmed by Delacroix's painting, make clear that Paganini's appearance was strange, if not repellent.'

'Having learned the watercolor technique from his British friends, he used it both for independent works of art and as a medium for sketching nature. He aptly described his approach, saying, "The special charm of watercolor, beside which any painting in oil always appears rusty and yellowed, is due to the inherent transparency of the paper."'

'Delacroix kept this work in his studio and returned to it more than twenty years later when he created a pastel of the same subject, also in the Getty's collection, as a gift for the writer Georges Sand.'

'Eugène Delacroix was the greatest representative of Romanticism in painting. Although not a practicing Christian, he frequently treated New Testament subjects, attracted by their drama and pathos, qualities favored by the Romantic movement.'

'The horsemen he encountered in Morocco were among his favorite subjects. As his writings attest, Delacroix saw in them a living incarnation of the noble of spirit and terrible strength of will that he associated with the heroes of antiquity.'

'Delacroix produced multiple variations on this theme in 1853 and 1854, when this particular biblical subject became popular with French Catholics during the reign of Louis-Napoléon (r.'

'Like many of his contemporaries, Delacroix took inspiration from the best-selling Romantic poetry of Lord Byron.'

'Like Picasso, Delacroix was a ceaseless re-inventor of his own forms, which reflected his inner state at any given time.'