Erminia and the Shepherds

Delacroix sent eight paintings to the Paris Salon of 1859 and was mauled for all of them. He was 61. Romanticism was treated as finished business, Courbet's realism was the argument of the day, and reviewers wrote about him as a leftover. He never exhibited at the Salon again, and died four years later. Baudelaire was one of the few who defended him in print that season. This canvas was among the eight. The story comes from Tasso's Jerusalem Delivered, published in 1581. Erminia, a Syrian princess, has ridden off in borrowed armour to find the crusader she loves, and comes out of the trees onto a shepherd and his family, who see only an armed soldier. Delacroix painted it in the studio he had built behind his flat on the rue de Furstenberg in Paris, which is a museum to him now.