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| Eugène Delacroix Académie 1822 drawing Musée du Louvre |
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| Eugène Delacroix Académie ca. 1820-22 drawing Musée du Louvre |
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| Eugène Delacroix Académie ca. 1830 drawing Musée du Louvre |
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| Eugène Delacroix Académie ca. 1830 drawing Musée du Louvre |
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| Eugène Delacroix Académie ca. 1830 drawing Musée du Louvre |
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| Eugène Delacroix Académie ca. 1830 drawing Musée du Louvre |
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| Eugène Delacroix Académie ca. 1830 drawing Musée du Louvre |
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| Eugène Delacroix Académie ca. 1830 drawing Musée du Louvre |
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| Eugène Delacroix Sheet of Studies ca. 1820-22 drawing Musée du Louvre |
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| Eugène Delacroix Sheet of Studies ca. 1820-22 drawing Musée du Louvre |
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| Eugène Delacroix Sheet of Studies ca. 1825 drawing Musée du Louvre |
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| Eugène Delacroix Sheet of Studies 1856 drawing Musée du Louvre |
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| Eugène Delacroix Sheet of Studies 1857 drawing Musée du Louvre |
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| Eugène Delacroix Figure Study 1858 drawing Musée du Louvre |
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| Eugène Delacroix Sheet of Studies 1862 drawing Musée du Louvre |
"Here are a few lines from Heinrich Heine which explain Delacroix's method rather well – a method which, like that of all robustly-framed beings, is the result of his temperament:
In artistic matters, I am a supernaturalist. I believe that the artist cannot find all his forms in nature, but that the most remarkable are revealed to him in his soul, like the innate symbology of innate ideas, and at the same instant. A modern professor of aesthetics, the author of Recherches sur l'Italie, has tried to restore to honour the old principle of the imitation of nature, and to maintain that the plastic artist should find all his forms in nature. The professor, in thus setting forth his ultimate principle of the plastic arts, had only forgotten one of those arts, but one of the most fundamental – I mean architecture. A belated attempt has now been made to trace back the forms of architecture to the leafy branches of the forest and the rocks of the grotto; and yet these forms were nowhere to be found in external nature, but rather in the soul of man.
Now this is the principle from which Delacroix sets out – that a picture should first and foremost reproduce the intimate thought of the artist, who dominates the model as the creator dominates his creation . . ."
– from The Salon of 1846, published in Art in Paris, 1845-1862: Salons and Exhibitions reviewed by Charles Baudelaire, translated and edited by Jonathan Mayne (London: Phaidon Press, 1965)