Study after the Model Aspasie

Delacroix was still in his twenties when he painted this, around 1824, years before the journey to Morocco that would change how he saw colour and light. The model was a young Creole woman recorded as Aspasie, someone he seems to have been close to at the time. He worked fast, in thick confident strokes, catching the turn of her head and the warm light on her shoulder without fuss. And he painted her over another picture. Under X-ray a second face surfaces beneath this one, the ghost of a composition he had abandoned. Delacroix never sold the study. It stayed in his own studio until his death in 1863.