The Lamentation (Christ at the Tomb)

Delacroix began this picture in 1847, and that April a Dutch count, Théodore de Geloës, agreed to buy it for 2,000 francs before it was finished. By the time it was shown at the Salon in March 1848, Paris had been through another revolution, King Louis-Philippe had fled, and that year's Salon opened without a jury, hanging whatever artists sent in. Six mourners gather around the body of Christ. The Virgin is at the left, Saint John in the foreground in a crimson cloak, and far off on the horizon the three crosses of Golgotha stand under a stormy sky, which makes the livid body and the white shroud look starker still. In 1873 the opera singer Jean-Baptiste Faure sold it at auction in Paris for 60,000 francs, 30 times what Geloës had agreed to pay. Years later Delacroix wrote in his journal that the painting stirred an emotion that astonished even him.