DELACROIX, Eugène
(b. 1798, Charenton-Saint-Maurice, d. 1863, Paris)

A Moroccan Saddling a Horse

1855
Oil on canvas, 56 x 47 cm
The Hermitage, St. Petersburg

Delacroix's Romanticism is virtually the opposite of German artists' interpretation of the style. But his interest in depicting animals - the lions in the grip of death's fury, the spirited horses, alongside which the humans seem like frozen statues - connects him with the prose of German Romantic writers, in which the theme of the human in the beast and the bestial in the human plays a substantial role.