Delacroix believed in the fundamental importance of training his hand, eye, and mind through drawing. Although he would later depart from the rules of academic draftsmanship, he began his career immersed in traditional instruction, entering the studio of the highly regarded painter and teacher Pierre Narcisse Guérin (1774–1833) at the age of seventeen and gaining admittance to the École des Beaux-Arts (School of Fine Arts) the following year. Certain practices he adopted as a student—including the study of the male nude and underlying anatomy, as well as drawing from sculpture, plaster casts, and prints—remained lifelong exercises.

In his only statement on drawing practices published during his lifetime, Delacroix endorsed a three-step pedagogical method: beginning with tracing, progressing to freehand copying, and then drawing from memory. Delacroix worked in each of these modes, and the range of copies on view here demonstrates the variety of sources he consulted to further his development as an artist. At the same time, the sketchbooks and sheets in the adjacent gallery show his commitment to sketching from nature, a practice he relied on to foster skills of observation, summon memories of places and things seen, and infuse a sense of life into a work. Drawing from memory ultimately enabled him to hone the observed into its essential form and integrate elements from his imagination.

"To imagine a composition," according to Delacroix, "is to combine elements of objects that one knows, that one has seen, with others held inside, in the soul of the artist." The drawings he made in direct preparation for works in other media exhibit precisely this blend of components: the observed, the remembered, and the imagined.

The studies on view show how Delacroix conceived, explored, and honed his ideas for his major projects through drawing. Whether he was planning a painting for the state-sponsored Salon, a mural program for a church or government building, or a print to be published as an illustration, drawing proved indispensable.

Delacroix invested considerable significance in his dynamic premières pensées (first thoughts), asserting that they contained "the germ of every characteristic the work [would] ultimately possess." Nevertheless, the artist's diverse figure and compositional studies expose the role drawing played as he continued to develop a work, divulging paths not taken and the evolution of the project over time. A group of drawings on tracing paper reveals how he used it as a tool to refine his motifs, especially when preparing prints.

Delacroix proclaimed that one of the things he valued in a drawing was the ability "to grasp the composition and the rendering in the same moment." This grouping brings together works that foreground their medium, demonstrating Delacroix's mastery of his materials and the imaginative compositions they inspired.

For the most part, Delacroix did not experiment in his selection of graphic media, preferring readily available writing papers, graphite, and ink. Yet he always aimed to achieve "the utmost effect from the particular qualities offered by the material means employed." Ink especially encouraged swift execution and free-flowing creativity. The works gathered here display the manifold qualities of line he achieved with pen and brush.

Delacroix's adoption of watercolor was unusual in early nineteenth-century France. Inspired by British contemporaries, he developed considerable skill in the medium, which suited his preoccupation with color. His highly finished watercolors were some of the only drawings he exhibited and circulated during his lifetime.