Tam O'Shanter poursuivi par les sorcières

Tam O'Shanter Pursued by Witches from 1849 at the Kunstmuseum Basel illustrates Robert Burns's poem. Delacroix's engagement with British literature extended beyond Shakespeare and Byron to Scottish poetry. 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 dramatic chase is rendered with dynamic energy and dark palette. Delacroix's handling creates a scene of supernatural pursuit with Romantic intensity.