Presents a new way of thinking about French painting in the 1820s and beyond. Fresh insights into the life and work of a hugely important and popular artist.



The image of Eugene Delacroix as an august artist with an august oeuvre was initially frozen into place by posthumous tributes and it has continued to the present. He was one of the finest yet least understood painters of the nineteenth century, the golden age of the French Romantic movement. He is remembered best for his masterpiece, La Liberte guidant le people, but few of his works have received the kind of constant, fascinated revisiting that has sealed the iconic status of Theodore Gericault's Le Radeau de la Meduse, for example. This book is one of the first to look carefully at individual paintings by Delacroix, especially at one of his most important works - a key but often overlooked painting from early Romanticism's heyday, Scene des massacres de Scio.