Works by Eugène Delacroix

Eugène Delacroix trained in the neoclassical manner of David, then turned to Rubens and the Venetian painters and built his pictures from colour and movement instead of crisp outline.

Two years after his first major painting was shown at the Salon of 1822 came The Massacre at Chios: Greek civilians rounded up by Ottoman troops, and no hero anywhere. At lower right a baby clings to its dead mother, a detail his critics called unfit for art. Byron gave him subjects such as The Combat of the Giaour and Hassan of 1826, where two riders and their horses meet as mirror images.

In 1832 he travelled to Spain and Morocco with a French diplomatic mission. Hidden with the ambassador in a Tangier attic, he watched the frenzy of a Muslim sect through a shuttered window. Convulsionists of Tangier, painted in 1837–38, sends the men reeling down a white street while women look on from the roofs. He returned to North African subjects until the end of his life: Arabs Skirmishing in the Mountains is dated 1863, the year he died.

Over half the works below are prints and drawings. In a lithograph of 1828 a wild horse rears out of the water, its mane streaming back in quick, loose strokes. He learned watercolour from British friends; in Episode from "The Corsair", shown at the Salon of 1831, a woman of the harem holds a lamp over an imprisoned pirate. There are flower pieces as well, dahlias and zinnias in a blue-and-white jar among them.

Sources: Wikidata, Wikipedia, Minneapolis Institute of Art, National Gallery of Art, Museum Ingres Bourdelle, Louvre, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, J. Paul Getty Museum, Art Institute of Chicago.