French Artists

One of the most prominent painters of the Romantic Movement in France, Delacroix was born on April 26, 1798, at Charenton-Saint Maurice. He studied under the French painter Pierre Guérin, with Géricault, who became major influences in his work.

Delacroix was trained in the formal Neo-Classical style of the French painter Jacques-Louis David, however, he enriched this with the more colourful works by Rubens, Michelangelo, Veronese, and the Venetian school, Constable, Bonington, and the English watercolorists. His paintings revealed his Romantic quality, in the temperament and in the choice of the subject for his works, which included mostly mythology and political, religious, and literary history.

Delacroix travelled quite a bit, spending several months in places such as England and Morocco, places from which he drew a lot of inspiration for his paintings. Another important source of inspiration for Delacroix's paintings included the lives and works of important literary figures such as Goethe, Byron, Scott and Shakespeare. Religious themes and animals in motion also made up a lot of his subject matter.

Not only a painter but also a portraitist, Delacroix painted the portraits of important contemporaries of his time, such as Paganini, George Sand and Chopin, as well as he himself. Delacroix died in Paris on August 13, 1863.

A very small list of his vast works, includes:

• "Massacre at Chios"
• "Greece Expiring on the Ruins of Missolongh"
• "The Death of Sardanapalus"
• "The Jewish Wedding"
• "Entrance of the Crusaders into Constantinopla"
• "Women of Algiers"