Romantics & Realists: Delacroix

Overview

This video is one of a series of six programs on some of the great artists of Western civilization. This episode focuses on the foremost painter of the romantic movement in France, Eugène Delacroix. Born in 1798, Delacroix helped lead the revolution in painting against the traditional classical painters. He was deeply influenced by a trip to northern Africa that exposed him to a new world of images, which he then painted. Among them were Arabs in Morocco, and exotic animals at play and in combat. Unlike classical artists, he painted in exuberant colors, with the freer expression typical of the romantics. Some of his best paintings are displayed, and historians relate the cultural milieu in which he lived and painted.