KEITH CHRISTIANSEN: This dramatic painting by Eugène Delacroix draws on a scene from Sir Walter Scott's novel, Ivanhoe. At the lower right is a knight, Sir Brian de Bois-Guilbert. He has sacked the castle, which is shown burning in the distance, and he has ordered his slaves to carry off the beautiful heroine Rebecca. Research Curator Asher Miller:

ASHER MILLER: This picture stands out as one of Delacroix's highest achievements in a type of painting in which he was extraordinarily gifted—the pictorial expression of the written word. Drama, action and movement are evoked by means of the instability of form. Notice the figure's blurred contours echoed in the vaporous disintegration of the burning castle. The composition unfolds slowly but rewards handsomely with patient observation. What emerges is that the visual center of the painting—Rebecca's limp body—lies at the intersection of two strong diagonals, like an X. One begins with the horse's head and continues down through the right leg of the slave at right. The other, a little harder to see at first, begins at the lower left with the drum, continues up through the horse's hindquarters and across Rebecca's waist. There is rhyme and alliteration in the repetition of forms—heads, arms, hands, legs, human and equine. While the first blooming of Romanticism is associated with the 1820s, Delacroix's example endured as a path of freedom of painterly expression for younger painters well into the century, including the Impressionists.