Delacroix was another of the pupils who had grown up in Guérin's studio, but he became the latter's antipode. Even in his student years he took counsel, not of the antique, but of Rubens and Veronese; and when Géricault was painting his "Raft of the Medusa," Delacroix belonged to the little band of enthusiastic admirers which gathered round the young master. He served as model for the half-submerged man to the left in the foreground of that picture. After busying himself at first almost entirely with caricatures, and studies of horses, and with Madonnas in the Classical style, he exhibited in 1822 his "Dante's Bark," in a pictorial sense the first characteristic picture of the century. One is inclined even to-day to repeat David's exclamation when he caught sight of the work, the first great epoch-making life-utterance of the revolutionary Romanticists: "_D'où vient-il? Je ne connais pas cette touche-la._" There were thoughts in it which had not been conceived and expressed in the same manner since the time of Tintoretto. Dante and Virgil, ferried by Phlegyas over Acheron, are passing among the souls of the damned, who grasp hold of the boat with the energy of despair. A theme taken from a mediæval author; an antique figure, that of Virgil, but seen through the prism of modern poetry. While the Florentine, stiff with horror, gazes upon the swimming figures which cling to the boat with teeth and nails, Virgil, tranquil and serious, turns on them a face which the emotions of life can no longer affect. The work obtained a decisive success. A carpenter in Delacroix's house had made for the young painter an inartistic frame of four boards. When he went to the exhibition and looked for his picture in the side-rooms he could not find it. The frame had fallen to pieces during removal, but the picture had been hung in an honourable place in the Louvre, in a rich frame ordered for it by Baron Gros. "You must learn drawing, my young friend, and then you will become a second Rubens," was the salute which this remarkable man, whose theory ever gave the lie to his practice, gave the young master. Naturally Delacroix would not now have been admitted into the school of David, or would have been placed there in the lowest rank--with Rubens and a few other immortals, who drew no better than he did. He was absolutely opposed to all the exact, regular, well-balanced, colourless traditions which held sway in David's school with their pedantic erudition and _bourgeois_ discretion. The principle of the Classicists was the Greek type of beauty, and the translation of sculpture into painting. In Delacroix's picture there was no longer anything of that sort. Géricault had already broken away from the academic stencilling of form, and had substituted natural expression, life, and emotion for conventional types; Delacroix now set aside the sullen colouring of the Classical school, and its painted statues made way for the colour-symphonies of the Venetians.