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Delacroix's grandest pictures have never left their country of origin. Only in Paris can we fully appreciate the bold reconciliation of beauty with cruelty, sensuality with control, fantasy with observation, modernity with tradition that characterises the art of this influential painter.'
As Byron signifies Romantic poetry, so Romantic French art means above all Delacroix. Like Byron he achieved his flamboyant artistic effects through intense intellectual application and a firm grasp of technique. Pupil of an academic artist, he was essentially self-taught through the study of the great Renaissance and seventeenth-century colourists in the Louvre. He was fascinated by the vibrant brushwork of the Venetians and their Flemish heir Rubens, imitating their capacity to simulate brilliant daylight even in the shadows, their use of colour instead of line as the primary structural element. It was precisely these effects which, as employed by Constable in the Hay-Wain exhibited at the Paris Salon in 1824, caused a sensation and further exacerbated Delacroix's fashionable Anglomania. In 1825, having sold his picture of the Massacre of Chios to the French State, he set out for London with two English friends, the watercolourists Richard Bonington and Thales Fielding. They visited galleries and the theatre and read English poets. Delacroix met other English artists, including Thomas Lawrence. Appropriately for a painting in an English collection, the lifesize likeness of Louis-Auguste Schwiter, painted after Delacroix's return to Paris, is an essay in the portrait style of Lawrence.
Schwiter, a lifelong friend of Delacroix, was himself a painter. He is presented here, however, as a gentleman, dressed in elegant black and hat in hand, standing on what appears to be the terrace of a great country house, as if waiting to be admitted. The blue Chinese vase with its heavily paint-textured flowers contrasts with the red lining of his hat. Like the trumpet vine clippings on the paving, these touches of colour serve to relate the foreground to the brooding sunset landscape (said to have been painted in part by Paul Huet, another artist friend), thus counteracting the isolation of Schwiter's monochrome silhouette.
The portrait is lit from the right, a reversal of the more usual illumination from the left, highlighting the left side of the sitter's face and perhaps helping to account for the curiously tentative impression he gives, despite his firm stance in the centre of the picture and his direct gaze. The unemphatic 'modern' pose, with its hint of English-style reserve, and the free 'unfinished' brushwork made this full-length portrait, at once so formal and so unconventional, unacceptable to the judges of the 1827 Paris Salon exhibition, and it was rejected. Delacroix later reworked the painting, finally completing it in 1830.
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