El polaco

This is a student exercise, an academie, the nude study every young painter had to grind out to learn the body. Delacroix made it around 1821 while training in the Paris studio of Pierre-Narcisse Guerin, still in his early twenties and years from the huge dramatic canvases that would make him famous. The model was a professional known simply as the Pole, a familiar figure who stood for a whole generation of painters and also posed for Gros and for Gericault. Delacroix keeps it plain, a standing man against a bare ground, one hand laid over his heart. The paint is on paper, later mounted on canvas, the sort of thing meant for the studio wall rather than a gallery.