A Barca de Dante

This was Delacroix's first big painting, sent to the Paris Salon of 1822 when he was just 24, and it walked straight into an argument. Three years earlier Géricault had shaken the same Salon with the Raft of the Medusa, a raft of the doomed heaving on real waves, and you can feel that shadow all over this canvas. Delacroix took a scene from Dante's Inferno, the poet ferried across the swampy river of hell with Virgil steadying him, while the damned claw at the little boat and try to climb aboard. One official judge sneered that it was a real daub. Another, the painter Gros, called it a chastened Rubens, and that side won, since the French State bought it that same summer. Look at the drowning figures, at the beads of water on their straining bodies, painted in blunt touches of pure colour.