Il naufragio di Don Giovanni

Delacroix took this from Lord Byron's poem Don Juan, and he chose its bleakest moment. A boatload of shipwreck survivors drifts on the open sea with no food left, and they are casting lots to decide which of them will be killed and eaten so that the rest can live. The little boat sits low in a grey-green swell, the figures slumped and waiting. Delacroix painted it in 1840, two decades after Gericault had shocked Paris with another raft of the doomed, and the debt to that older picture is plain. When he showed it at the Salon of 1841 the state did not buy it. The Louvre only acquired the canvas in 1883, 20 years after his death.