Insisting on the significance of color rather than line and evocating the expression of passion and poetry in painting, the French Romantic artist, Ferdinand Victor Eugéne Delacroix, is remembered as a fascinating man, a great painter, and a typically intellectual French hero, who came to epitomize the French aesthetics of romanticism.

The master of exotic passion, Delacroix was born on April 26, 1798, at Charenton-Saint-Maurice in Île-de-France, near Paris.