Don Quixote Charging the Sheep

Don Quixote Charging the Sheep is one of several paintings Decamps devoted to Cervantes's tragicomic hero — a subject that held deep appeal for French Romantic artists, who read Don Quixote as an allegory of idealism confronting an indifferent, prosaic world. Delacroix, Daumier, and Decamps all returned repeatedly to the knight of La Mancha, finding in him a figure for the Romantic artist's own predicament: imagination at war with reality. Decamps's version of the famous windmill-tilting episode — here transposed to the sheep incident, where the Don mistakes a flock for an opposing army — emphasizes absurdist comedy over pathos. The choice of the sheep episode allows Decamps to draw on his animal-painting skills while constructing a scene of magnificent delusion. The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston holds this work as part of a strong Romantic collection.

Decamps used dynamic diagonal composition to convey the charge's momentum, with the knight's lance cutting across the picture plane. The flock of sheep is rendered with Decamps's characteristic animal-painting fluency — loose, assured strokes capturing movement and mass simultaneously.