The Lamentation of Christ

In January 1857 Delacroix was elected to the Académie des Beaux-Arts at his eighth attempt. He was 59, often too ill to work, and before that year was out he had moved to a flat near Saint-Sulpice so that the chapel he was decorating there stood a short walk from his bed. This canvas reaches back 14 years, to a Lamentation he had painted on the wall of the Paris church of Saint-Denys du Saint-Sacrement, with the dead Christ laid across his mother's knees. He took the composition up again here on canvas, holding the Virgin's grief at open despair. Baudelaire, writing about that wall painting in 1846, called it a terrible hymn to sorrow.