Landscape with Bridge

Delacroix is remembered for big, turbulent oils, so a quiet watercolour like this shows a side of him the public rarely saw. Watercolour was for him a private, rapid medium, learned in good part from an English friend. In 1825 he crossed to London and fell in with Richard Parkes Bonington, a young English painter who had brought the fresh, luminous English watercolour manner to Paris. The two sketched together and later shared a studio, and Delacroix said he never tired of watching Bonington's easy hand and the speed of his work. He carried some of that lightness into his own landscapes. A sheet like this, a bridge in open country laid in with thin washes, is the colourist thinking on paper. Thousands of such studies stayed in his studio and were only scattered at the great sale after his death in 1863.