The Painter's Painter

Delacroix's reach runs through almost every movement that followed:

• His side-by-side color method pointed the way for Monet, Renoir, and the Impressionists
• His travels abroad sharpened his sense of light in ways European painting had not seen
• His journals — thousands of pages — are still read by working artists today

He believed a painting should strike the senses directly, the way music does. That conviction, more than any single canvas, is what later artists kept returning to.