L'appartement du comte de Mornay

The Apartment of the Count de Mornay from 1833 at the Louvre shows an interior scene from Delacroix's patron's home. The richly appointed room provided material for his explorations of color and light in interior settings. Delacroix's method combined rapid, gestural underpainting with careful final glazing, creating surfaces of extraordinary richness and warmth; his studio practice was meticulous despite the apparent spontaneity of the results. Eugène Delacroix, the greatest painter of the French Romantic movement, combined the emotional intensity and coloristic ambition of his Romantic program with a classical learning that made his art simultaneously revolutionary and deeply rooted in the European tradition. His visits to Rubens's works in Belgium, his admiration for Constable's color which he encountered at the Salon of 1824, and his long study of Venetian colorism were the foundations of a painting practice that combined observation, emotion, and historical imagination in ways that no French painter had previously achieved. His journals and correspondence document one of the most intellectually rigorous artistic minds of the nineteenth century.

The interior is rendered with rich color and atmospheric light effects. Delacroix's handling of the decorated room creates a scene of cultivated domestic luxury.