The Entry of the Crusaders into Constantinople

The full-size Entry of the Crusaders, almost five metres wide, was painted for King Louis-Philippe's history museum at Versailles and shown at the Salon of 1841. In 1852 Delacroix went back to the subject at a size a collector could hang at home. This canvas is about a metre across, signed and dated in the lower left corner, and the Louvre calls it a reduction with variations. The scene is still the fall of Constantinople in April 1204, when knights of the Fourth Crusade took the Byzantine capital. The riders come in under their banners with the city and the sea behind them, while the townspeople kneel and plead in the foreground. Sold at auction in Paris early in 1853, it later belonged to the collector Adolphe Moreau, and his grandson Étienne Moreau-Nélaton gave it to the Louvre in 1906.