The years 1837-1841 mark a fruitful epoch in Delacroix's career. The masterpieces that issued from his studio in these years would alone have sufficed to establish his lasting fame. In 1837 he painted the magnificent "Battle of Taillebourg," which is the glory of the gallery of battle pictures at Versailles, but found so little favour with the jury of the Salon that it narrowly escaped being rejected. The tumult and confusion of hand-to-hand fighting had never before been rendered with such force and such absence of heroic attitudinising. To the next year we owe "The Enraged Medea," of the Lille Museum, and that extraordinary scene of fitful, jerky, furious movement known as "Les Convulsionnaires de Tanger," which, after having twice changed hands at public auction during the artist's lifetime, for L87 in 1852 and for L1160 in 1858, rose to L1940 at a sale held in 1869, and finally found a purchaser for L3800 in 1881. The "Jewish Wedding in Morocco," in which the painter's concern with true tone-values and beautiful quality of pigment is carried even further than in the "Algerian Women," and the intensely dramatic "Hamlet and the Gravediggers"--both are now at the Louvre--were his chief works in 1839; whilst in the following year he devoted his energies to the large "Justice of Trajan" (now extensively restored) at the Rouen Gallery, and the powerful "Shipwreck of Don Juan," surely one of the most tragic and impressive pictures ever conceived by human genius. It bears the same relation to the "Dante and Virgil" that "The Crusaders" bears to "The Massacre of Scio." And it is one of the most striking instances of Delacroix's power to make colour itself expressive of the mood of the drama. The conception, though based on Byron's poem, owes little to the literary foundation--that is to say, it is not illustrative in the sense that acquaintance with the poem is essential for its appreciation. It is just a vivid realisation of the combined horrors of shipwreck and starvation in which the tragic aspect of sea and sky is as significant as the ghastliness of the wretches whom hunger has turned into cannibals. The sombre tonality and the flashes of livid light, recall El Greco in his later period. To the year 1841 belongs "The Entry of the Crusaders into Constantinople," of which mention has already been made.