Combate de caballeros en el campo

Armoured knights fighting in open country was a fashionable subject in Paris in the 1820s. Walter Scott's novels were being translated as fast as he wrote them, the theatres were full of the Middle Ages, and Delacroix painted duels of this kind more than once. This canvas has a complicated record. Alfred Robaut, who catalogued Delacroix in the 19th century, judged the signature in the corner to be another hand's work, and specialists have since asked whether the picture was completed after the painter died in 1863, or whether it is a fireplace panel of 1824 that was long listed as lost. The Louvre dates it only to the second quarter of the century. It arrived in 1906 with the collection of Etienne Moreau-Nelaton, and it hangs in the room that carries his name.