Eugène Delacroix

Sketches like this came out of a few months tagging along with a French mission to North Africa, according to Wikipedia — notebooks filled up on the trip, then the big painting worked out later, back home. One journey he kept mining for years afterwards.

The story behind it came from a Byron play about an Assyrian king who, with defeat coming, has everything he owns destroyed in front of him rather than let anyone else have it. Apparently the critics went for it hard when it was first shown, and it did him no favours with the officials who handed out state commissions.

The fighting behind this was three days on the barricades in Paris that swapped one king for another. The state bought it almost straight away, and then — from what I've read — kept it off the walls for years, because a picture of an armed crowd winning turned out to be an awkward thing to display once the new lot were in charge.

The scene comes straight out of Dante — the poet being rowed across a river in hell, steadied by his old Roman guide, while the drowned try to climb aboard. From what I've read it was the first big thing he ever showed in public, and it more or less made his name on the spot.