In these words Delacroix is very aptly characterised. His range of subjects included everything: decorative, historical, and religious painting, landscape, flowers, animals, sea pieces, classical antiquity and the Middle Ages, the scorching heat of the south and the mists of the north. He left no branch of the art of painting untouched; nothing escaped his lion's claws. But there is one bond uniting all: to all the figures for which he won the citizenship of art he gave passion and movement. His predominant quality is a passion for the terrible, a kind of insatiability for wild and violent action. His over-excited imagination heaps pain, horror, and pathos one upon another. The critics called him "the tattooed savage who paints with a drunken broom." There is nothing pretty or lovable about his art; it is a wild art. He depicted passion wherever he found it, in the shape of wild animals, stormy seas, or battling warriors; and he sought it in every sphere, in nature no less than in poetry and the Bible. Hardly any painter--not even Rubens--has depicted with equal power the passions and movements of animals: lions in which he is own brother to Barye; fighting horses, in which he stands side by side with Géricault. No other artist painted waves more grand, wind-beaten, foaming, dashing, towering on high. Looking at them, one divines all the horrors concealed beneath the roar of the blue surface, horrors which were as yet so insufficiently suggested in Géricault's "Raft of the Medusa." In his historical pictures there reigns now terror and despair, as in the "Massacre of Chios"; now gloomy horror, as in the "Medea"; now feverish movement, as in the "Death of the Bishop of Liège." He passes from Dante to Shakespeare, from Goethe to Byron, but only to borrow from them their most moving dramatic situations--Hamlet at Yorick's grave, his fight with Laertes, Macbeth and the Witches, Lady Macbeth, Gretchen, Angelica, the Prisoner of Chillon, the Giaour, and the Pasha. All time is his domain, all countries are open to him; he hurries through the broad fields of imagination, a lordly reaper of all harvests. [Illustration: _Baschet._ DELACROIX. MEDEA.] And at the same time, in all his great human tragedies, he compels the elements to obey him as if they were his slaves. The passions of men set heaven and earth in motion. The agonising cries of victims find in his paintings an echo in the sullen shadows and the leaden, heavy clouds of the sky. The gloomy shores which Dante's boat is approaching are as desolate as the spirits who wander through the night. But where splendour and glory reign, as in the "Entry of the Crusaders into Constantinople," the air, too, glistens and shines as though saturated with dust of gold. In his pictures a human soul which was great and full of meaning, and which possessed such combustibility that it took fire of itself, expressed itself recklessly, with the volcanic strength of an elemental power.