The Spring - Eurydice bitten by a serpent while picking flowers (Eurydice's death)

Sometime before January 1856, the Alsatian industrialist Frédéric Hartmann asked Delacroix for four large canvases of the seasons, to decorate his house in Colmar. Delacroix answered with myths. Spring became the death of Eurydice, bitten by a snake while she was gathering flowers, and the young man catching her as she falls is usually read as Orpheus. The job dragged on for years. In April 1860 Delacroix wrote in his diary that the four Seasons were well advanced, and in January 1861 he was still noting their measurements. At the same time he was finishing his murals in the Paris church of Saint-Sulpice. The canvases were never completed in his hands, and they later reached the market finished off by an academic painter. Around 1930 those additions were removed, and in 1958 the São Paulo museum bought all four.