Ferdinand Victor Eugène Delacroix (26 April 1798 – 13 August 1863) is a French Romantic artist regarded from the outset of his career as the leader of the French Romantic school.

Delacroix's use of expressive brushstrokes and his study of the optical effects of color profoundly shapes the work of the Impressionists, while his passion for the exotic inspires the artists of the Symbolist movement.

A fine lithographer, Delacroix illustrates various works of William Shakespeare, the Scottish writer Walter Scott and the German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.

In contrast to the Neoclassical perfectionism of his chief rival Ingres, Delacroix takes for his inspiration the art of Rubens and painters of the Venetian Renaissance, with an attendant emphasis on color and movement rather than clarity of outline and carefully modeled form.

Dramatic and romantic content characterize the central themes of his maturity, and lead him not to the classical models of Greek and Roman art, but to travel in North Africa, in search of the exotic.

Friend and spiritual heir to Théodore Géricault, Delacroix is also inspired by Lord Byron, with whom he shares a strong identification with the "forces of the sublime", of nature in often violent action.

(Clark, Kenneth, Civilisation, page 313.

Harper and Row, 1969.)

However, Delacroix is given to neither sentimentality nor bombast, and his Romanticismis that of an individualist.