La Sepoltura di Cristo

This is a young man's homework. In 1820 Eugene Delacroix was 22 and still unknown, and like every ambitious student in Paris he spent his days in the Louvre copying the old masters. Here he is working from Titian's Entombment of Christ, following the older painter's grouping of mourners lowering the body into the tomb, while loosening the touch in his own way. Copying was how a painter learned colour and drama before the age of the museum reproduction, and Delacroix took from the Venetians a warmth and movement that would soon unsettle the official Salon. He kept this small canvas and left it to one of his own pupils, who gave it to the museum in Lyon in 1881.