Eugène Delacroix (1798-1863), who belonged to a family that had given to France many distinguished statesmen and soldiers, was a pupil of Guérin, whose conventional teaching, however, was little to the taste of a young man whose passionate nature had been fired by his extensive reading of romantic literature, and who preferred to form his style on the works of Rubens and other old masters at the Louvre, and to benefit from his intercourse with Géricault and Bonington. The _Dante and Virgil_, which is now in a deplorable state of neglect, was bought by the State at the not very generous price of £50. Delacroix’s next Salon picture, _The Massacre of Scio_ (No. 208), caused an even greater storm of abuse of the young artist who had dared to depict the horrors of this scene from the Greek War of Independence, as it was thought, in all their crudeness, without the heroical and theatrical poses that were deemed necessary for pictorial “histories.” The magnificent atmospheric background owes its origin to Delacroix’s first acquaintance with the _Hay Wain_ and two other pictures sent by Constable to the Salon of 1824, which caused the impetuous young artist to repaint in a few days the sky and landscape. The picture was again bought by the State, the price this time being raised to £240. A superb study for the dead mother and child in the right-hand corner has been bequeathed by M. Cheramy, the present owner, to the National Gallery, where it is to be hung next to “the best Constable.” It is impossible here to give a full account of the twenty-one paintings by Delacroix at the Louvre, to which should be added his decorative masterpiece, the centre of the ceiling in the Galerie d’Apollon. We must content ourselves with a brief reference to his more important canvases, first of which in order of date is _The 28th of July 1830: Liberty leading the People_ (No. 209), better known as _The Barricade_. The introduction of a bourgeois with a top-hat in this stirring scene of contemporary heroism was another act of defiance. But the dramatic power of the conception, which suffers but is by no means destroyed by the wretched allegorical figure of Liberty, and the artist’s appeal to political passion, caused the picture to be an enormous success. DELACROIX’S ORIENTAL PICTURES