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The Assassination of the Bishop of Liège, for which he had found the subject in Sir Walter Scott's
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Quentin Durward, and which was painted for Louis-Philippe, then Duke of Orleans. It is a marvellously vivid realisation of this terrific scene.
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Who would ever have thought that one could paint noise and tumult? wrote Théophile Gautier in his enthusiastic appreciation of this work.
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Movement is all very well, but this little canvas howls, yells, and blasphemes! The realisation of the wild and sanguinary orgy described by Scott is complete and absolute; and yet, in the long list of Delacroix's
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pictures, there is none that is so strictly pictorial in conception and less tied to the letter of the author's description. It is not so much the detail, the personal action of each participator in the drama, upon which the artist depends to tell this ferocious tale of unbridled passion, but the atmosphere of vague terror, the mysterious gloom of the lofty hall, the flaring flames of the torches, the flashes of brilliant reflections thrown up from the luminous centre provided by the white tablecloth, of the importance of which Delacroix was well aware when he said one evening to his friend Villot:
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To-morrow I shall attack that cursed tablecloth which will be my Austerlitz or my Waterloo.