Étude de babouches

Study of Babouches from 1832 at the Louvre documents the Moroccan slippers that Delacroix sketched during his North African journey. Such studies of exotic objects fed his Orientalist paintings throughout his career. As the leading French Romantic painter, Delacroix brought passionate color and dynamic energy to all his subjects; his journal records his constant study of color relationships and his admiration for Rubens, Constable, and Veronese. 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 still-life study captures the colorful footwear with fresh observation. Delacroix's handling of the rich colors and textures demonstrates his sensitivity to exotic materials.