La Lutte de Jacob avec l'Ange

Delacroix worked on this in the late 1850s, painting it directly onto the wall of a side chapel in the Paris church of Saint-Sulpice. He was in his sixties, often ill, and treated the commission as the summing-up of his life's work. He would be dead by 1863. The subject comes from Genesis: Jacob grappling all night with a mysterious stranger who turns out to be divine. Delacroix makes the two figures near equals, locked together under tall trees, while Jacob's abandoned flocks and baggage stream past on the left. He kept a diary through these years that records how hard the physical labour of the wall had become.