The late works of Delacroix. (works of Eugene Delacroix, Philadelphia Museum of Art, through Jan. 3, 1999)

Nation, The, November, 1998 by Danto, Arthur C.

Nineteenth-century French painter Eugene Delacroix was distinguished by the ways in which he used color to light his images. His colors were fused to allow the eye to join them in a natural way, thus increasing the luminosity in a painting from the observer's point of view.

At the press opening of the fascinating exhibition of Eugene Delacroix's late work at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (until January 3), a colleague and I paused before a luminous painting of a puma next to a tree. Neither of us, not surprisingly, happened to know much about pumas, let alone their habitat, but even so we felt that the puma and that particular tree would not normally share an environment. In fact, there is uncertainty as to whether the magnificent feline is a puma at all -- it has...

Read the rest of this article with a Free Trial at HighBeam Research.

Premium Content Partnership | HighBeam Research provides an in-depth online archive library of reference works.