O rapto de Rebeca

Delacroix showed this at the Paris Salon of 1846, and every French Romantic in the room would have known the story at a glance. It comes from Ivanhoe, the novel by the Scottish writer Walter Scott, whose medieval adventures were the runaway bestsellers of the age. The Jewish heroine Rebecca is being carried off by two Muslim servants on the orders of a Christian knight, while behind them the castle of her captor burns. Delacroix jams the figures together and tilts the ground so the whole scene seems to pitch forward. He returned to the same subject 13 years later in a second version, now in the Louvre in Paris.