レベッカの略奪

Delacroix took this from Walter Scott's novel Ivanhoe, then hugely popular across Europe. Rebecca, held captive in a burning castle, is lifted onto a horse by two servants at the order of the knight Bois-Guilbert, who has seized her for himself. Delacroix painted the subject twice. The first version, from 1846, is now in New York. This one, from 1858, sets the flaming castle of Front-de-Boeuf higher and more prominently, so the whole scene seems to tilt and swirl. By then Delacroix was an old man, and Romanticism, the movement he had led as a young firebrand thirty years before, was long past its first heat. He showed the painting at the Paris Salon of 1859, one of the last times he exhibited there before his death.