Eugène Delacroix -The Education of Achilles

Ferdinand Victor Eugène Delacroix ( 26 April 1798 – 13 August 1863) was a French Romantic artist regarded from the outset of his career as the leader of the French Romantic school.Delacroix had first captured this subject--Chiron, the wisest of all centaurs, training Achilles in the art of hunting--on a corner of a curved ceiling devoted to poetry in Paris's Palais Bourbon Library, which he decorated from 1838 to 1847. On visits to Delacroix's studio twenty years later, Sand admired the new, rectangular painting of the subject the artist was working on. That canvas was promised to another admirer, so Delacroix made this nearly identical pastel for her and wrote to Sand's son, Maurice, informing him of the gift.