Delacroix was born to aristocratic parents in Paris. He studied under the master Theodore Gericault. Much of his education came from copying the old masters at the Louvre, where he delighted in the works of Rubens, Veronese, and the Venetian school. He was introduced to water colors by a friend and fellow artist from England and the next year he would travel there to study their style of painting.

Like other Romantic artists he used current events as well as a wide range of literary sources for the subjects of his enormous canvases. He counted among his favorite writers Lord Byron, Shakespeare, Dante, the ancient works of Virgil, as well as the Greek and Roman playwrights.

Delacroix is perhaps best known for his color studies, which would be admired by later artists including the Impressionists and Post- Impressionists. Delacroix and the other Romantics, more then any other group of artists, used their heavy brush strokes to convey emotion and add a sense of movement and action to their paintings.

Delacroix was hailed as the leader of the Romantic school. He and fellow Romantics Gericault and Gros believed that color and brush stroke were the most important aspects of a picture, opposing Ingres and the Neo-Classical school's theory of line over color.