La barca di Dante

This is a Delacroix, more or less, painted by a very young Manet. In the mid-1850s he was in his early twenties and still finding his way, and like most students then he learned by setting up an easel in the Louvre and copying the masters. Delacroix's own Barque of Dante, from 1822, hung there as a landmark of French Romanticism, and Manet made this small version after it, the two poets crossing the infernal water among the clawing damned. He is said to have called on Delacroix to ask leave to copy it and found the older man politely cool. Manet made a second copy of the same picture too, and that one now hangs in New York.