Portrait of Leon Riesener

In 1835 Delacroix was two years into the first of his great state commissions, the painted decoration of the Salon du Roi in the Chamber of Deputies, which kept him on scaffolding until 1837. This head was made away from all that, at Frépillon north of Paris, the country house of his Riesener relatives. A handwritten label on the frame still gives the place and the year. Léon Riesener was his first cousin, ten years younger and a painter himself, and Delacroix had already put his name forward for the history galleries at Versailles. He faces straight out, hair disordered, tie knotted in a hurry, the green brown ground behind him brushed in at speed. It has the look of a sitting done from life in one go. Between 1840 and 1842 the two cousins worked side by side again, on ceilings for the library of the Senate.