Paysage à Champrosay

Landscape at Champrosay from 1849 shows Delacroix painting near his country retreat southeast of Paris. Champrosay provided him a refuge from urban life and inspired numerous landscape studies in his later years. Delacroix executed the work with his characteristic broken, energetic brushwork and rich colorism, building up his surfaces in ways that directly influenced the Impressionists who studied his technique at the Louvre after his death. 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 landscape is rendered with rich atmospheric color and fluid brushwork. Delacroix's handling of natural light and foliage creates an intimate scene of countryside beauty.