Luigi d'Orléans mostra la sua amante

By the mid-1820s Delacroix was the loud young provocateur of French painting, fresh from the uproar over his huge Massacre at Chios. This is the opposite kind of picture: tiny, private, meant for a collector's cabinet rather than the Salon wall. He set it in France around 1400, at the court of the mad king Charles VI. The man drawing back the bed curtain is the king's brother, Louis, Duke of Orleans, showing off a sleeping mistress to a companion. The joke, cruel and quiet, is that her face stays turned away because the visitor is her own husband. Delacroix worked it in the small-scale troubadour manner then in fashion, all velvet and candle-warmth and borrowed medievalism, on a panel barely a foot high.