Two years break from painting ceilings, in which he painted five floral works, several landscapes, and went skying.
Delacroix
Around 1616, Rubens painted a series of Hunts featuring lions and tigers. Delacroix love these and in 1855 painted his own Lion Hunt. But neither had ever seen anything like this.
Five of the narrative 22 paintings he made for the ceiling of the library in the Palais Bourbon.
A landscape, Roman history, Orientalism, a scene from Scott’s Ivanhoe, a crucifixion, and more scenes from Byron.
Hamlet, including the first visualisation of Ophelia’s death; Christopher Columbus, Medea about to kill her sons, and shipwreck survivors in a small boat.
As he continued to paint history and other narrative works, and turn his watercolours from North Africa into finished oil paintings, he started decorative painting for the State.
Cadmus, Europa’s brother, kills a dragon and sows its teeth to grow into the men who help him build Thebes. But his grandson Actaeon is killed when he catches Diana bathing.
A history painting of a battle in 1477 was criticised. Then he was taken as artist to a diplomatic mission to Morocco, and turned Orientalist.
After a set of 17 lithographs illustrating Goethe’s ‘Faust’, his most famous painting of ‘Liberty Leading the People’ that was only seen infrequently over the next 40 years.
For his third Salon in 1827, he submitted one huge work developed from Lord Byron’s account of the death of Sardanapalus.
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