Eugène Delacroix

Paintings by the Flemish baroque artist Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640), celebrated for his use of color, significantly impacted Delacroix. He produced copies after paintings by Rubens which he had seen in the Louvre and at museums abroad, and after engravings reproducing Rubens' work. The northern artist's name also appears frequently in Delacroix's journal as he grappled with the legacy of his predecessor's prodigious oeuvre.
Among Delacroix's copies are those that owe a debt to Rubens' 1620 canvas The Spear Thrust (Le Coup de Lance), which Delacroix had seen at the Musée Royal des Beaux-Arts in Antwerp. Delacroix first visited Antwerp, Rubens home town, in 1839, returning in 1850 when he studied the artist closely and made copies after him. According to Delacroix, when he saw Coup de Lance in the museum on 10 August 1850, another artist was copying the canvas and lent him a ladder to study the painting closely. Delacroix included a lengthy discussion of the canvas in his journal that day, and the following day he noted, "Made drawings from memory of all the things that had impressed me during my expedition to Antwerp.” This drawn copy, evoking Rubens's robust pen and wash studies, is one of the sheets he made from memory. Here, Delacroix condensed the composition of Rubens's painting, focusing on Christ, the soldier, and one of the thieves.
Further underscoring the impact of this particular Rubens painting on the artist, Lee Johnson identified a pastel version of the composition as among those Delacroix executed after his 1839 visit (Johnson III, p. 221, fig. 50) and dates to 1845 an oil sketch on panel related to the painting (Museum Boijmans-van-Beuningen; Johnson III, 432). Delacroix painted another version of the composition in 1846; it was shown at the Salon the following year (Walters Art Gallery, Baltimore; Johnson III, 433).