ルイ=オーギュスト・シュヴィテールの肖像

Delacroix painted his friend Louis-Auguste Schwiter, a young fellow artist, standing full-length on a terrace, and you can feel how much he had just been looking at English portraiture. He had crossed to London in 1825 and come back admiring Lawrence and Gainsborough, their easy grandeur. It was his first full-length portrait, and the Salon jury of 1827 turned it down, perhaps unhappy with the balustrade, which he later reworked. The picture stayed in his studio for years. Long after, another painter obsessed with drawing bought it, and Edgar Degas kept it in his own collection until his death, when it finally passed to a museum.