Tam O'Shanter

In the mid-1820s the young Romantics in Paris were reading British writers with real hunger, the novels of Walter Scott, the poems of Byron, the plays of Shakespeare. Delacroix drew subjects from all of them, and here he turns to the Scottish poet Robert Burns. Tam, a farmer riding home drunk from market, lies flat along the neck of his grey mare under a ragged, moonlit sky. Look to the right. A pale witch has already caught hold of the horse's tail. The canvas is only about 30 centimetres across, and the museum dates it to 1825. Nottingham Castle bought it at Sotheby's in 1980. Its collection also holds work by Richard Parkes Bonington, born just outside Nottingham, who shared a Paris studio with Delacroix for a while in 1826.