Perseus and Andromeda

In 1853 Delacroix was 55 and at work on the ceiling of the Salon de la Paix in the Paris city hall, a large public commission that would burn with the building in 1871. Beside that he kept making small mythologies, and this is one of them, painted on paper and afterwards laid down on canvas, barely bigger than a sheet of writing paper. The Staatsgalerie notes that he took his cue from a Titian of the same subject and then went his own way with the colour, reaching back past his own century to deep Baroque reds and golds. Perseus comes through the air, Andromeda is still chained to her rock, and the sea monster is in the water below. He had done the same thing with Rubens for years, borrowing a composition and repainting it hotter.