Nereid

Around 1822 Delacroix, in his early twenties and barely started, set up before a Rubens and copied a single figure out of it. The original is one of the enormous canvases Rubens painted for Marie de' Medici, the queen mother of France, showing her arrival by sea at Marseille with muscular sea-nymphs heaving at the ship below. Delacroix took just one of those nereids, a twisting nude seen from behind, and turned her into a small study on her own. Copying old masters was ordinary training for a young painter, and the choice of Rubens, all warm flesh and churning water, already shows where his eye was drawn. The cycle he studied then hung in the Luxembourg palace in Paris and is now in the Louvre.