The Murder of the Bishop of Liège

In the late 1820s the historical novels of Walter Scott were the rage in Paris, and Delacroix, freshly devoted to English writing after a stay in Britain, took this scene straight from Scott's Quentin Durward. It shows a real medieval event dressed up as fiction, the killing of Louis de Bourbon, Bishop of Liege, during a 15th-century revolt, staged in a torchlit banqueting hall gone to chaos. For all that violence the painting is surprisingly small, only a little over a metre wide, its crowd whipped up with quick, loose brushwork rather than careful finish. Delacroix built the whole packed room around the long diagonal of the table, leaving the murder itself half-swallowed in shadow at the far end.