Delacroix was a French Romanticist painter, draughtsman and lithographer. From the outset of his career, he was regarded as the the leader of the French Romantic school, one of the greatest painters of the first half of the nineteenth century and the last of the great history painters in Europe. His use of expressive brushstrokes and his study of the optical effects of color shaped the work of the Impressionists, while his passion for the exotic inspired artists of the Symbolist movement.

His early education was at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand, where he was steeped in the classics and won awards for his drawings. In 1815 he began his training with Pierre-Narcisse Guérin in the neoclassical style of Jacques-Louis David.

At the heart of Delacroix’s career is the paradox between the revolutionary and the conventional. As an arch-enemy of Auguste-Dominque Ingres, the leading figure of the French Romantic movement, Delacroix was celebrated for undermining the tradition of painting established by Jacques-Louis David, yet he enjoyed official patronage from the beginning of the Restoration, 1814-30, until the Second Empire, 1852-70.

Delacroix became friends with Paul Delaroche and Theodore Gericault with whom he formed the central group of historical painters, as never before in one locality and at one time. He also taught several pupils, the most known being Pierre Cécile Puvis de Chavannes.

Delacroix worked indefatigably, having his pictures very seldom favorably received at the Salon. These works were sometimes very large, full of incidents, with many figures.

In 1845 he was employed to decorate the library of the Luxembourg, the chamber of deputies in 1847, the ceiling of the gallery of Apollo in the Louvre in 1849, and the Salon de la Paix in the hotel de ville in 1853.

He died in August 1863, and one year later, in August 1864, an exhibition of his works was opened on the Boulevard des Italiens. It contained 174 pictures, many of them of large dimensions, and 303 drawings. As a colorist, and a romantic painter, he now ranks among the greatest of French artists.