Ferdinand Victor Eugène Delacroix was born in Charenton–St-Maurice near Paris in April 1798. Delacroix was a French Romantic artist regarded from the outset of his career as the leader of the French Romantic school. As an artist he was inspired by the works of Rubens and the Venetian Renaissance painters, Mantegna, Giorgione and Titian. Baudelaire the writer and art critic said of Delacroix “Delacroix was passionately in love with passion, but coldly determined to express passion as clearly as possible”
My painting for today is one that hangs in the Louvre entitled Death of Sardanapalus which Delacroix painted in 1827. This massive canvas features the defeated Assyrian ruler Sardanapalus propping himself up on a large bed on which a naked woman prostrates herself begging for mercy. Sardanapalus, on learning that his armies had been defeated, ordered that his possessions were to be destroyed and that his sex slaves were to be murdered before immolating himself.
my daily art display 