Anacreon and a Young Girl

Fresco was an Italian art, learned in front of the walls of Rome and Florence, and Eugène Delacroix never went to Italy. He knew the method from books. In the autumn of 1834, at Valmont, an old abbey in Normandy that belonged to his cousins, he tried it for himself and painted this scene above a door in a first-floor corridor. The subject is Anacreon, a Greek poet of the 6th century BC whose songs are about wine, love and growing old. He sits white-bearded with his lyre, while a young nude woman facing him points straight at him. Fresco gives no second chances. The pigment goes into wet lime plaster, and each patch has to be finished before the plaster dries. Delacroix, who went back over his canvases again and again, turned away from true fresco for the large wall decorations he painted afterwards.