La Mort de Lara (étude)

This is a study for a scene Delacroix took from Byron, whose poems fed his imagination for 40 years. In Byron's tale of 1814, Lara is an aloof nobleman with a hidden past who is struck down by an arrow in a skirmish and dies slowly, cradled by his young page Kaled. Only once Lara is dead does the crowd around him discover that the devoted page is a woman, Gulnare, who had followed him in disguise. Delacroix worked this up around 1848, laying the dying man out pale on the ground while the slight figure of the page bends over him. Being a study, it is loose and quick, the colour brushed in to catch the pose and the light before the finished canvas. He returned to literary deaths like this one all through his career, and here the whole thing turns on a detail the paint barely spells out, the grieving page who is not the boy she seems.