Stillleben mit Hummer und Jagd- und Fischereitrophäen

Delacroix painted this for an old Napoleonic general with a country estate, and it is one of the strangest things he ever made. Two big cooked lobsters lie in the grass on a hilltop, next to a dead pheasant and hare, a hunting gun, and a game-bag of Scottish tartan. Beyond them the land drops away to rolling green country where tiny red-coated riders chase a fox, an English scene rather than a French one. In the 1820s Delacroix was mad for England. He admired its painters and would soon cross the Channel to see the place for himself. He showed the picture at the Paris Salon of 1827, the same crowded exhibition where his violent, much-argued-over Death of Sardanapalus hung a few rooms away.