Monograph on the pastel drawings of Eugène Delacroix by Lee Johnson. "This volume gathers together all the extant pastels of Eugène Delacroix (1798 - 1862), the leader of the French Romantic movement in painting, the greatest colourist and the most vesratile master of the first half of the nineteenth century. These beautiful pastels, housed in collections from London to Los Angeles to Cairo, are rarely exhibition due to their fragility. Published here as a group for the first time in full colour, they provide sheer visual delight as well as enormous insight into Delacroix's endlessly inventive working methods. In Delacroix's art, great imaginative themes are married to a power and energy of style inspired by his visual experiences, his study of the old masters, and the literature and events of his own time. Pastel played an essential role in the process of creating these heroic paintings. Aspects of such masterpieces as The Death of Sardanapalus and The Women of Algiers originated in pastel studies. In these works, Delacroix experimented with figure positions, colours, compositional structures; so close were these two media for the artist that he even attempted to imitate the effects of pastel in the Saranapalus. In his comprehensive introduction, Lee Johnson discusses Delacroix's interest in the medium of pastel and its place in his oeuvre as a whole, from the first reference to the technique in one of his school exercise books to his last known pastel, a finely wrought, signed version of one of his favourite compositions, The Education of Achilles, which he presented to George Sand in 1862." -- from interior flap. Includes full-color and black-and-white plates with commentaries. Also includes notes to the commentaries, a list of recorded but unlocated pastels, chronology, and a guide to the abbreviations.