Self portrait

By 1860 Eugène Delacroix was in his early sixties and often unwell, the fire of his youth long since poured into huge public commissions. For decades he had led French Romanticism, the painter who put movement, colour and raw feeling on canvas while his rivals prized cool, careful line. Here he turns that eye on himself. There is no studio clutter, no brush in hand, no prop to announce the trade, only a dark coat, a steady look and a face used to being studied. By this point he had spent years covering the walls and ceilings of Paris, the Palais Bourbon, the Louvre, the church of Saint-Sulpice, with vast decorative schemes, and his health rarely let him climb the scaffolds any more. He would be dead within three years, and this is among the last times he set down his own likeness.