Il prigioniero di Chillon

Delacroix belonged to a generation of French Romantics half in love with Lord Byron, the English poet who had died in 1824 while backing the Greek fight for independence. He mined Byron's writing for pictures again and again. Here he took the poem The Prisoner of Chillon, which Byron wrote in 1816 after visiting the lakeside castle in Switzerland. The prisoner is Francois Bonivard, a real Genevan held in the dungeon of Chillon in the 1530s for his politics. Delacroix shows him chained to a pillar, straining toward a younger brother who is sinking, with a third brother already dead nearby. He painted it in 1834 and sent it to the Salon the next year, where the loose, urgent brushwork drew as much comment as the grim story. The Louvre did not buy it until 1906.