Apollo Slays Python

In 1850 the French state handed Delacroix a job the Louvre had been putting off for nearly two hundred years. The central panel of the Galerie d'Apollon, the palace's golden gallery, had sat blank since the days of Louis XIV, and its subject was fixed by that old scheme: Apollo, god of the sun, driving his light down onto the serpent Python in the swamp below. This is the oil sketch Delacroix made first, working the whole idea out at speed, thinking in colour. The blazing yellows and oranges around Apollo are set against the cold purples of Python and its smoke, warm light pushing on cold dark. That trick of firing one colour off its opposite is just what a young Vincent van Gogh would later study in Delacroix, part of why this small, burning sketch hangs today in his museum in Amsterdam.