Alongside of these easel pictures he produced, during a period of more than twenty-five years, a long list of monumental and decorative works; and they too were the most inventive, the boldest, and the most original which monumental painting produced during this epoch, not in France only, but in Europe. In this sphere also, where, under the pressure of old traditions and conventional types, it is so difficult to avoid plagiarism, Delacroix maintained his individuality. In 1835, at the suggestion of his friend Thiers, he was commissioned to paint the interior of the Chamber of Deputies in the Palais Bourbon--the most important commission which had fallen to the lot of any French artist since Gros painted the cupola of the Pantheon. Not long afterwards he decorated with verve and enthusiasm the ceiling of the Louvre, choosing for his subject the "Triumph of Apollo." In the Library of the Luxembourg he had recourse to the _Divina Commedia_, and treated in a masterly manner the theme so familiar and sympathetic to him. In his works there is something of the joyous and sportive energy of Rubens' allegorical pictures, but not the least trace of imitation. He understood decorative painting in the sense of the great old masters, Giulio Romano and Veronese, not as wall didactics and lectures on archæology; he knew that descriptive prose has nothing whatever to do with the walls of a building, but that the sole aim of such paintings is to fill the house with their solemn grandeur, to make the whole building resound as it were with sacred organ music. Between 1853 and 1861 came also the wall paintings in the Church of Saint Sulpice, and one would almost think that Delacroix finished them in feverish excitement, to show for the last time how enormous a store of passion and power still lay in the soul of a sexagenarian. Shortly after their completion, on 13th August 1863, he died, who was, in the words of Silvestre, "the painter of the genuine race, who had the sun in his head and a thunderstorm in his heart, who in the course of forty years sounded the entire gamut of human emotion, and whose grandiose and awe-inspiring brush passed from saints to warriors, from warriors to lovers, from lovers to tigers, from tigers to flowers." [Illustration: _Baschet._ DELACROIX. HORSES FIGHTING IN A STABLE.]