Artist

Eugène Delacroix: where to see him across these museums

French, 1798–1863. The leading painter of French Romanticism, and Ingres’s great rival in a decades-long argument over whether colour or line should carry a painting.

Rooms and display status checked against each museum’s own collection database.

Delacroix built his reputation on drama and colour rather than the polished contours favoured by Ingres and the academic tradition — a divide the two men never resolved and that later painters, Impressionists included, read as pointing toward colour’s future. His 1832 trip to Morocco and Algeria supplied him with subjects and a palette he returned to for the rest of his career.

He also worked at a monumental scale most easily seen outside museum walls: large decorative cycles for the Palais Bourbon, the Luxembourg Palace and the church of Saint-Sulpice in Paris, finished over years alongside his easel paintings. He died in Paris in 1863, having outlived most of the arguments he started.

Delacroix paintings on display, museum by museum

The Art Institute of Chicago

Cleveland Museum of Art

Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

The Louvre

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

The National Gallery, London

National Gallery of Art, Washington

Musée d’Orsay

Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid

Rooms and display status checked against each museum’s own collection database.

Listen to the commentary in the gallery

This list tells you where to look. In front of the actual painting, CulturAll adds the audio commentary: photograph the work or its label, listen, then ask your questions.