The subject is taken from Dante's "Inferno," and represents the poet and his companions and guide standing in a bark conducted by Phlegyas, while around them appear on the surface of the water the writhing bodies of the condemned, among whom Dante recognizes certain Florentines.] I have used the term audacious in speaking of Delacroix, and circumstances forced him to justify the epithet. Yet to a student of his work, and still more of his character as revealed in his writings (his recently published letters and the few articles published during his life in the "Revue des Deux-Mondes"), he would appear to have been by nature prepared to receive the full academic tradition, and only because of what appeared a violation of the tradition _as he understood it_, to have arrayed himself in violent opposition: a situation which rendered him in work and in life contradictory to his natural instinct. It is the old story of the defect of system. Even the most cunningly devised cannot make a place for all the many manifestations of temperamental activity. Like Géricault, a pupil of Guérin, Delacroix found in his master and in the general spirit of the school an insistence on the letter of the classic law to which his richly endowed nature could not bend, and was thus forced to rebel; whereas a more elastic application of received principles would have found him an enthusiastic adherent. In this way he missed acquiring the technical mastery over form, which proved a stumbling block to him through life. At times his drawing is possessed of a vigor and life which even Ingres never had; at others his work is almost lamentable in its lack of constructive form. In respect to color in its finest, most harmonic qualities, he is the greatest of French painters; and at all times he is master of an intense dramatic force. It was with a masterpiece--"Dante and Virgil"--that he made his first appearance at the Salon in 1822. At a bound he found himself famous. Guérin, who had counselled him against sending his picture to the Salon, grudgingly acknowledged that he was wrong. Gros told him that it was like Rubens, with more correctness of form--Rubens "chastened" was the word. The government bought the picture, paying the artist two hundred and forty dollars--twelve hundred francs--for it.