The Barque of Dante

Description

In 1822, a young painter in Paris was preparing his first submission to the Salon, the official exhibition that could make or break a career. Eugene Delacroix chose a scene from Dante rather than a classical myth or a portrait commission, a decision that set him apart from the academic painters around him. This barque of Dante reproduction brings that debut into a room where its ambition is still legible on the surface.

About Barque of Dante Reproduction

The canvas illustrates Canto VIII of the Inferno, the passage in which Dante, shaken with fear, crosses the river Styx with his guide Virgil in the boat of the ferryman Phlegyas. The dead crowd the water, clutching at the sides of the vessel in a bid to climb aboard, their bodies twisted and half submerged beneath a sky thick with smoke from the burning City of Dis. Dante pulls back from the reaching hands while Virgil holds him steady, a contrast between panic and composure that runs through the whole composition. Phlegyas leans into the oar, his cloak torn back by wind, driving the boat forward against the current and against the storm.

Delacroix had studied Theodore Gericault closely, and the debt shows in the muscular handling of the bodies and the wet, glistening paint of the flesh and water. The palette stays dark through most of the canvas, greens and blacks and a deep grey sky, broken by the orange glow of the fire behind the city and by touches of warm flesh tone on the struggling figures. The brushwork is loose and fast in places, built up wet into wet rather than smoothed to a polish, and that roughness was itself part of the argument the painting made against the tighter finish of the academic tradition.

The hand-painted reproduction

Each hand-painted oil painting reproduction from this listing is worked on artist-grade canvas by a trained painter who studies the Louvre original to match its tonal structure, the heat of the fire against the cold of the water, and the direction and weight of every stroke. This is a handmade oil painting, built up in layers of real oil colour rather than printed, so the surface carries the same ridges and thin passages a conservator would look for in the original. Collectors who care about condition and surface will find the texture reads correctly at close range, not only from across a room.

• Hand-painted in oil on artist-grade canvas
• Available in multiple sizes to suit your wall
• Delivered gallery-ready, stretched and prepared for framing
• Certificate of authenticity included with every order
• 90 day returns with a full refund or a free replacement, no restocking fee

It suits a collector drawn to literary subjects and the Romantic break from academic painting, and it holds its own in a study, a library, or any room built around darker, serious colour.