"...Ferdinand Victor Eugène Delacroix (French: [ø.ʒɛn də.la.kʁwa]; 26 April 1798 – 13 August 1863) was a French Romantic artist regarded from the outset of his career as the leader of the French Romantic school.[1] Delacroix's use of expressive brushstrokes and his study of the optical effects of colour profoundly shaped the work of the Impressionists, while his passion for the exotic inspired the artists of the Symbolist movement. A fine lithographer, Delacroix illustrated various works of William Shakespeare, the Scottish writer Walter Scott and the German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.
In contrast to the Neoclassical perfectionism of his chief rival Ingres, Delacroix took for his inspiration the art of Rubens and painters of the Venetian Renaissance, with an attendant emphasis on colour and movement rather than clarity of outline and carefully modelled form. Dramatic and romantic content characterized the central themes of his maturity, and led him not to the classical models of Greek and Roman art, but to travel in North Africa, in search of the exotic.[2] Friend and spiritual heir to Théodore Géricault, Delacroix was also inspired by Lord Byron, with whom he shared a strong identification with the "forces of the sublime", of nature in often violent action.[3]
However, Delacroix was given to neither sentimentality nor bombast, and his Romanticism was that of an individualist. In the words of Baudelaire, "Delacroix was passionately in love with passion, but coldly determined to express passion as clearly as possible."..."
"Tasso in the Hospital of St Anna at Ferrara" by Eugène Delacroix.
"...Torquato Tasso (Italian: [torˈkwaːto ˈtasso]; 11 March 1544 – 25 April 1595) was an Italian poet of the 16th century, best known for his poem La Gerusalemme liberata (Jerusalem Delivered, 1581), in which he depicts a highly imaginative version of the combats between Christians and Muslims at the end of the First Crusade, during the siege of Jerusalem. He suffered from mental illness and died a few days before he was due to be crowned as the king of poets by the Pope. Until the beginning of the 20th century, Tasso remained one of the most widely read poets in Europe...."
From "Eugene Delacroix, Selected letters. 1813-1863." Selected and translated by Jean Stewart. artWorks. ISBN 0-87846-632-0. MFA Publications. Copyright 1970.
"...How tremendously interesting the life of Tasso is! What misfortunes that man endured! How indignant one feels with those shameful patrons who oppressed him under pretext of protecting him against his enemies, and who deprived him of his beloved manuscripts! What tears of rage and indignation he must have shed on seeing that in order to make sure of keeping them from him, his patrons declared him mad and incapable of creating!...One weeps for him; one moves restlessly in one's chair while reading his story; one's eyes gleam threateningly, one clenches one's teeth involuntarily...."
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