Porträt von Delacroix, Maler

When the museum in Rouen bought this small portrait in 1893, for 1,510 francs, it bought it as a Géricault, a picture of a young friend. The sitter is Eugène Delacroix at about 18, around 1816, when he had recently entered the studio of Pierre-Narcisse Guérin and was posing for Géricault, seven years older and already at work on big canvases. The head comes forward out of a dark ground with a hard, low light on it, which is part of why the attribution held for so long. Laboratory examination by the French museums' research centre has moved it back to Delacroix, as a self-portrait he began, with a second hand, still unidentified, finishing it in that darker manner. Rouen now shows it as a self-portrait, while the old catalogue title still travels with it.