Delacroix regarded the Salon—the annual state-sponsored exhibition of contemporary art held at the Louvre—as the most effective venue for gaining recognition. From 1822 onward, the works he exhibited there were carefully chosen to reflect his singularity and independence, as well as a growing artistic boldness that shocked some critics. Nonetheless, his work earned him the support of the director of the royal museums, Auguste de Forbin, who ensured that Delacroix's paintings were purchased by the French state.

A number of these great Salon paintings—among the artist's best-known works—are too large or fragile to travel; part of the fabric of the Louvre itself, they require a visit to Paris. Yet Delacroix's youthful energy and ambition were such that the story of his first decade is no less evident in other works from the same period, each exceptional in its own way. The paintings in this gallery reveal Delacroix's brilliance and drive as he sought to establish his reputation. In under ten years, he tried his hand at almost every genre, from the literary to the modern, gaining fame as the leader (if a reluctant one) of the avant-garde.

Delacroix manifested a preoccupation with portraiture mainly in likenesses of the people closest to him. Born into a distinguished family, he was orphaned in 1814 and impoverished soon afterward, which intensified boyhood friendships that proved enduring. He used portraiture as a vehicle to channel his aesthetic interests, especially his fondness for English art, and, occasionally, to test the boundaries of acceptability.

Delacroix engaged in self-portraiture infrequently, preferring to turn inward by committing his thoughts to writing, but he was hardly self-effacing. After his first triumph at the Salon of 1822, he wrote: "Glory is not an empty word for me. The sound of praise gives me real happiness."

In a reflection of his inner state of mind, his sense of place in the world, and thoughts of his own artistic legacy, he also depicted his artistic antecedents. In this way, he demonstrated a sense of identity with artists and poets of the past, imbuing them with a melancholic aspect that suggested their genius.

Delacroix was not a prodigy, but he developed sophisticated artistic tastes at a precocious age. A lifelong denizen of the Louvre, he made many copies after the old masters.

At seventeen, he took up formal training under Pierre Narcisse Guérin, a prominent Neoclassical painter famous for dramatic historical subjects, and learned from him the fundamental practice of drawing from the live model. The distinctive presence of his models' individual features would become the fulcrum around which Delacroix was able to revitalize history painting. Whereas Neoclassical practice emphasized composing pictures on the basis of an idea and turning to live models at a second stage, for Delacroix the model was a key stimulus for his ideas. The same held for his interest in things—the world of objects with their various surfaces, colors, textures, and cultural and historical associations.

Conscious of his individual approach, he wrote in 1824: "I must make many sketches and take my time. That above all is where I need to make progress. . . . The main thing is to avoid that infernal facility of the brush. Instead, make the medium difficult to work with, like marble—that would be completely new. Make the medium resistant, so as to conquer it patiently."

Delacroix was interested equally in the physiognomy of animals and humans and in the way one group could reveal aspects of the other. In the world of the imagination animals could be envisaged free of human dominion, in scenes outside the realm of human experience.

As with the human figure, animals held an allure for Delacroix that was both instinctual and conditioned by artistic cues. His fellow French artist Théodore Gericault was a brilliant painter of horses and an admirable horseman. Delacroix was keenly aware of the centrality of animal subjects in recent British art, as well as the earlier example of Peter Paul Rubens's seventeenth-century hunt scenes. Delacroix's investigations intensified through friendship with the sculptor Antoine-Louis Barye, who would become the foremost animal specialist of the era. Beginning in 1828, they studied together at the menagerie in Paris's Jardin des Plantes, an important center of scientific study. The following year, Delacroix sent an urgent note to Barye: "The lion is dead. —At a gallop. The time to act is now. I'll wait for you there." Specimens, dead or alive, yielded invaluable information to the artist.

For the young Delacroix, the depiction of war was a key challenge of history painting. The decade of Napoleonic military campaigns that ended in 1814, when he was still in school, had endowed this genre of painting with a particular prestige. Two older French painters he admired—Théodore Gericault and Antoine Jean Gros—had managed to reconcile the celebration of heroism and the horrors of war. But after Napoleon's downfall, the way forward was not clear.

When Delacroix resolved to take his place as their successor, his new point of reference was the English poet Lord Byron, particularly his involvement in the Greek War of Independence in the 1820s. A number of works in this gallery—as well as paintings elsewhere in the exhibition, such as Greece on the Ruins of Missolonghi—derive from this infatuation, which was widespread among the youth of Delacroix's generation.

About 1830, when the vogue for all things Greek diminished, the artist turned his talent to medieval battles. His only state and princely commissions for war paintings treated subjects from the distant past. For these he drew from history and literature, including the historical novels of Byron's elder contemporary, Sir Walter Scott.

By the mid-1820s Delacroix was celebrated enough to be invited to contribute illustrations to deluxe literary publications—notably a French translation of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Faust. This epic tragedy, written in 1808 in the form of a drama in verse, recounts the corruption of Faust by the demon Mephistopheles, who has made a bet with God that he can win the protagonist to his side. In 1826 Delacroix began to produce the lithographs that would illustrate the 1828 publication.

Delacroix found greater inspiration in modern literature than in the classics, and he was drawn to foreign authors such as Goethe and Shakespeare. The blend of horror, fantasy, and dark humor in their tragedies appealed to the Romantic sensibility. Delacroix chose passages to illustrate based on his personal response rather than for their significance to the narrative. He embraced lithography, a recently invented printing method, which freed him to reproduce his drawings without assistance—and to exploit the chromatic possibilities of black.

The Faust prints on view, a set never before exhibited in its entirety, are proof impressions that enabled Delacroix to check the progress of each image as he developed it. Some contain sketches in the margins (called remarques) that were effaced prior to publication, and many do not yet feature captions. Together with a selection of preparatory drawings and the book in its final form, they give a view of the artist's creative process.

From January to July 1832, on the heels of the French invasion of Algeria, Delacroix accompanied a diplomatic mission to neighboring Morocco, where he visited Tangier and Meknes, followed by stays in Seville and Algiers. Already famous, he set out in search of new inspiration, with no specific artistic project in mind. Little was known about Morocco in early nineteenth-century France; Delacroix experienced it as bracingly unfamiliar and invigorating. He felt he had traveled more in time than in space, viewing Moroccan society as a "living antiquity." In Tangier on June 4, he wrote: "There are Romans and Greeks at my doorstep. . . . I know now what they were really like. . . . Rome is no longer in Rome."

He returned to France with notebooks full of drawings and writings that added two new strings to his bow: an ability to paint episodes from classical history through a new lens, and a desire to depict scenes of contemporary daily life ennobled by what he understood as the "timelessness" of North Africa. In this way, he could avoid the social and aesthetic issues that might be raised by everyday images of contemporary France. Delacroix drew from the journey for the rest of his career. In the influential Women of Algiers in their Apartment (1834), he explored the decorative force of painting without reliance on narrative drama, beguiling later painters from Cézanne to Matisse.

The paintings in this gallery, all completed between 1835 and 1839, demonstrate the fecundity of Delacroix's imagination at midcareer. His reputation already made, he continued to put himself on the line at the Salon, sometimes by tackling controversial subjects he had contemplated for a decade or more.

These pictures also reflect Delacroix's undertaking of ambitious mural commissions. Beginning in 1833, when he was selected to paint the king's audience chamber in the Palais Bourbon, and for the rest of his career, Delacroix's artistic approach would be invigorated by large-scale decorative projects. This kind of work linked his name to prestigious Parisian monuments, enabling him to reform the timeworn genre of allegory and to associate his achievements with those of illustrious predecessors.

Delacroix's art, which had always relied on a keen sense of drama, even to the point of formal distortion, thus became infused with a new grandeur as well as a deep reflectiveness that came with age. These factors came into play in his ongoing effort to produce paintings for the Salon, where he was subjected to the conservative tastes of the jury and the whims of the public and the critics, while retaining the strength of his convictions.

The Salon of 1849, which took place during the brief years of France's Second Republic, saw the rise of a new generation of painters known as Realists, committed to representing contemporary everyday life. Delacroix, who had just turned fifty, stood apart with sumptuous floral compositions illustrating the expressive power of color. The vibrancy of his paintings reflects his interest in Baroque art. It was at this time that he began to contemplate a commission for the central panel of the ceiling in the Louvre's Gallery of Apollo, designed in the 1660s for King Louis XIV.

From the 1840s onward, Delacroix returned to the chivalric scenes he had explored in the 1820s, drawing inspiration from Renaissance authors and from writers popular in his youth. The subjects he chose were decidedly old-fashioned, but his aim was to reconcile his deep respect for European cultural heritage with the freedom of his painting style.

By embracing subjects removed from everyday life, Delacroix gained a deeper regard for the past and for memory, a cornerstone of his creativity. To Delacroix, memory acted as a filter, distilling and dignifying the subjects that appealed to him. As he wrote on the last page of his Journal, "the great artist roams his domain, and there he offers you a feast to his own taste."

Delacroix's art was increasingly full of contrasts from the 1840s onward. In the two years before the explosion of flowers in 1849, he had exhibited entirely different subjects at the Salons: Christ on the Cross and The Lamentation (Christ at the Tomb) depict the martyr's suffering, with compositions derived from earlier masters and an austere, shadowy style echoing the chiaroscuro of the seventeenth-century painter Caravaggio.

Never before had Delacroix limited his palette to such a narrow range of colors in order to arrive at such touching pathos; never before had he worked so diligently on the sketch and overall unity at the expense of accessory details. His experience working on a prestigious church mural commission in Paris in the early 1840s seems to have inspired this tendency. The artist (who resumed keeping a journal in 1847, after a gap of more than twenty years), finally believed himself capable of overcoming what he called the "facility of the brush" and of taming his palette, "an instrument that only plays what I want it to play."

Delacroix sketched landscape scenery out of doors in every phase of his life, often extending the practice by working from the resulting studies, or from memory, after he returned to his studio. Only when his estate sale revealed the extent of this informal production, however, did his innate gifts in this genre become widely known. As was the case for much of the history of European art, landscape (or seascape) played a subsidiary role to the figure in Delacroix's paintings. But its importance grew over time, culminating in the magisterial forest setting of Jacob Wrestling with the Angel, a mural painting in the Parisian church of Saint-Sulpice that occupied him from 1849 until 1861, making it his final large-scale project.

A signal moment in Delacroix's ongoing practice of landscape sketching occurred in 1844, when the artist rented a country house at Champrosay (about twenty miles south of Paris), which he eventually bought. He wrote that while he had always enjoyed the countryside during visits to friends and relatives, having his own retreat deepened his connection to nature.

The Exposition Universelle of 1855 served as the Second Empire's expression of French supremacy in industry and the arts. For the occasion, Delacroix was invited to organize a retrospective exhibition of his work and also received a state commission, which he fulfilled with The Lion Hunt, a painting that ties together themes that had long sustained his interest. This was not the final chapter for the artist, who continued to work until his death in 1863, but it represented the triumph of a career marked by a commitment to remain in the public eye. Although he was no longer the young man who could "run across the rooftops," as a fellow painter reportedly described him at his Salon debut in 1822, no other artist of his generation persisted with the mettle and fervor of the first flush of Romanticism.