Wounded Brigand (Roman Shepherd)

Delacroix was still in his twenties when he painted this small canvas, barely 40 centimetres across, of a brigand shot and left to die in an empty landscape. The man has dragged himself to a trickle of water, and as he drinks he bleeds into it. There is little academic finish here, no careful contour, only quick patches of colour that resolve into a body, a rock, a red stain in the stream. He held onto the picture and showed it only at the Salon of 1827, where handling this loose and unpolished still unsettled viewers used to a smooth surface. The second title, Roman Shepherd, points to the wild country outside Rome, where armed bandits were a real danger to travellers.