Rebecca and the Wounded Ivanhoe

Walter Scott's medieval novels were the rage of 1820s Paris, read aloud in drawing rooms as fast as they could be translated from the English. In 1823 the young Delacroix took up his first subject from Scott, a scene out of Ivanhoe. The wounded knight struggles up from his sickbed while Rebecca, who has been nursing him, describes the battle raging outside the besieged castle. Delacroix keeps the fighting off the canvas entirely. Instead he paints the two of them reacting to it, her outstretched arm carefully finished, the strokes around it left in a nervous blur that stands in for the violence she is watching. He was in his mid-twenties, a year before the huge Massacre at Chios that would make his name.