Naufrage sur la côte

Delacroix painted this in 1862, the year before he died. He was in his sixties by then, often ill, and had largely retreated from the huge public canvases that made his name. What he kept making were small, charged pictures like this one, a single dismasted ship breaking up off a rocky shore, seen from the safety of the land. The shipwreck was a favourite subject across the nineteenth century, a way to set human helplessness against weather and rock, and Delacroix returned to it again and again in his last years. He worked here from memory and imagination rather than any real wreck, drawing partly on the dramatic Italian scenes of the printmaker Piranesi. There is no rescue in the picture and no clear story, only the vessel, the surf, and the coast. It hangs now in Houston, a long way from the northern shores he knew.