Eugène Delacroix

In late July 1830 the people of Paris spent three days on the barricades and drove out their king, Charles X. Eugene Delacroix, 32, watched from the sidelines and felt he had not done his part, so he did it with a brush. That winter he painted a bare-breasted woman striding over the dead with the tricolour flag in one hand and a musket in the other, leading a crowd of workers and street boys through the gunsmoke. Liberty Leading the People turned a week of real street fighting into the image France still reaches for whenever it rebels.

Delacroix led the other half of French painting from Ingres, the half that trusted colour and movement and feeling over clean drawing. Two years after Liberty he got the experience that set his palette alight. In 1832 he travelled to Morocco with a French diplomatic mission, and the light, the robes, the horses and courts of North Africa hit him like a revelation. He filled notebooks with quick watercolours and drew on that half-year journey for the next 30 years, more than 70 paintings coming out of it.

He was a Romantic in his friendships too, close to the composer Frederic Chopin, whom he painted at the piano, and to the writer George Sand. For much of his life he kept a journal that is still read as one of the sharpest things any painter has written about painting. Near the end he covered a chapel in the church of Saint-Sulpice in Paris with murals, one of them an angel wrestling Jacob among trees he had studied in a wood outside the city; he finished them in 1861 and died two years later.