Roméo et Juliette au tombeau des Capulets

Delacroix caught his love of Shakespeare early. In 1827 an English troupe played Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet in Paris, in English, and it electrified a young generation of French Romantics, the composer Berlioz among them, who fell for the actress on stage. Delacroix came back to these plays for the rest of his life. Here he takes the last scene. Romeo has entered the Capulet tomb and lifts Juliet from her bier, believing her dead, not knowing she is only drugged into sleep. He works small, in thinned oil on paper, and keeps the vault dark so the two pale bodies carry all the light. He held this kind of literary subject close. It stayed in his own studio, now the museum that bears his name.