Scène de sabbat

By the late 1820s the talk of literary Paris was a book most Frenchmen had never read in the original — Goethe's Faust. A new French translation appeared in 1828 carrying a set of lithographs Delacroix had drawn for it, and word came back that Goethe himself felt the young Frenchman had outrun his own imagination. Delacroix kept returning to that world. This canvas, barely larger than a sheet of paper, is one of those returns: the Walpurgis Night, the witches' sabbath on the mountain where the devil Mephistopheles leads the scholar Faust into a swarm of demons and half-seen bodies. He worked it in smears of firelit colour rather than clean outline, so the whole thing reads as movement in the dark. He painted it around 1831, when Goethe, the man whose vision he had chased, was in his early 80s with barely a year left to live.