Delacroix, The Abduction of Rebecca

This is a painting by Eugène Delacroix. It’s called The Abduction of Rebecca, based on the novel Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott, incredibly popular in France in the 1820s. Brian de Bois-Guilbert, the fellow on the horse, has just participated in the sack of the castle in the background. He’s directing his Saracen slaves to take away Rebecca, the Jewish heroine of the novel. The figures on the horse and all their accoutrements are painted rather thickly but really very quickly. I see forms coming together, I see them coming apart. and the seemingly haphazard use of the brush And those strokes are very different from the very fluid way he’s painted the horse’s mane that billows off his neck. What we see looks vaporous. We see smoke, we see fire, we see tiny little figures that almost look like bits of something stuck in the paint. It makes me keep looking. It’s a still image, but I see it in motion. We have a really strong sense of Delacroix improvising as he’s painting, very much in the way that in the twentieth century, an American jazz musician might improvise on a popular tune. Starting off with a statement that’s something familiar, something that we know, something very conventional, and then taking off into unknown territory. Every time I walk into the gallery in which this painting hangs, it seems smaller to me than it did in my mind’s eye. It grows in my memory, there’s so much going on in it, it seems to me that it can’t possibly reside on so small a surface.