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Pietà at St. Dénis-du-Saint-Sacrement in seventeen days. An even more striking instance is afforded by the
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King Rodrigo losing his Crown, now in the Cheramy Collection. A number of artists had agreed to contribute towards the decoration of a room in a villa taken by Alexandre Dumas père in 1830. Delacroix was of their number; and the day agreed for the completion of the pictures was to be celebrated by a ball. When Delacroix arrived at midday of the day in question he found that all the panels were in their proper places, leaving only an unexpectedly large gap for his own contribution.
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He had meant only to paint a few flowers. 'Listen,' said Dumas, 'I have just been reading something that will do for you,' and he described the first canto of the 'Romancero,' in which Rodrigo loses his crown. Delacroix began at once, and had painted the whole scene by sunset, in the most unusual colours, a harmony in yellow, unique in his work. Great was the enthusiasm in the evening when the friends saw the picture; Barye, in particular, who had contributed an excellent panel, is said to have been beside himself.
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Journal, which ought to be consulted and carefully studied by every artist, and a number of carefully constructed magazine articles on various æsthetic questions, which only reveal the cool intellectual side of his dual nature. He was a man of great reticence, who rarely allowed himself to be drawn into criticising the art of his contemporaries. In his critical comments on the masters--even on those whose style was diametrically opposed to his own temperament--he always proved himself keenly appreciative of their great qualities. Strangely enough, Delacroix, who is considered the leader, and certainly was one of the main inspirers of the Romanticist movement, not only disliked the application of this term to his own art, but had little sympathy with the Romanticist literature of his own time and country. His attitude towards Victor Hugo almost amounted to hostility; and he always treated Baudelaire, who had espoused his cause with keen enthusiasm, with the most calculated reserve. In music his tastes were severely classical--