La Fiancée d'Abydos

Delacroix took this scene from a poem by Lord Byron, The Bride of Abydos, which English readers of the 1810s had devoured. Selim and Zuleika, cousins raised almost as brother and sister, love each other against every rule around them. Cornered on a rocky shore by her father's armed men, Selim fires his pistol to call for rescue from the sea while Zuleika clings to him. Delacroix returned to this pair several times in the 1840s and 1850s, drawn to Byron's tangle of forbidden love and violence as much as to the eastern setting. He worked the Louvre version over several years, finishing it around the middle of the 1840s. The loose, flickering brushwork was exactly what his academic critics disliked.