Eugène Delacroix

Born at Charenton-Saint-Maurice near Paris on 26 April 1798, he died in the capital on 13 August 1863. His contemporaries already read him as the head of the Romantic school in French painting, the rival of Ingres and of the Neoclassical line.

Where the academy prized careful contour, he looked instead to Rubens and to the Venetian Renaissance, and let colour and movement carry the picture. His loose, expressive handling and his study of how colours act on the eye would later mark the Impressionists, while his taste for the exotic fed the Symbolists.

The Barque of Dante, his first Salon picture, shown in 1822, shows Dante and Virgil ferried across the Styx with the damned clinging to the boat; the French state bought it, and it entered the Louvre after his death. Two years later the Salon hung the Massacre at Chios, over four metres of Greek suffering after the Ottoman slaughter of 1822, a frieze of victims with no hero anywhere in it.

In 1830 he painted Liberty Leading the People, the July Revolution of that year carried over a barricade by a woman in a Phrygian cap with the tricolour raised.

A journey to North Africa led him away from the classical models of Greece and Rome toward subjects he found there. The first Women of Algiers, painted in Paris in 1834, shows four women in an enclosed room and keeps the viewer firmly outside; a second version, fifteen years later and now in the Musée Fabre in Montpellier, welcomes the eye in.

Not everything is a grand machine. The Orphan Girl at the Cemetery, close in date to the Chios canvas, is a single weeping figure that holds as a masterpiece on its own, and he painted literary episodes, animals and lovers' squabbles with the same driving brush.