Eugene Delacroix

Eugene Delacroix was a French painter regarded as the leading figure of Romanticism in the visual arts, distinct from but overlapping with the literary Romantic movement of the same era. Where the reigning Neoclassical school prized clear outline, restrained composition and subjects drawn from antiquity, Delacroix favored dramatic color, energetic brushwork and turbulent movement, taking his subjects from contemporary events, literature and North African travel. His 1830 painting Liberty Leading the People, commemorating that year's July Revolution, remains one of the most widely reproduced images of French Romanticism and hangs in the Louvre. Delacroix's rivalry with the Neoclassical painter Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, color and emotion against line and restraint, became one of the defining critical debates of nineteenth-century French painting.