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

Medea about to Kill her Children

1838 (1862)
Oil on canvas, 122 x 84 cm
Musée du Louvre, Paris

As to the Medea in this painting, no heroine could better express the destructive power of women, a theme dear to the Romantics as it was to their successors, the Symbolists. Repudiated by Jason, Medea takes her revenge by killing the two children she has born to him; the subject is taken from Euripides' tragedy, Medea.

This pcture is a reduced version, made in 1862, of Delacroix's large painting (260 x 165 cm) exhibited at the Salon of 1838, now in the Musée du Lille.




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