The Shipwreck of Don Juan
Eugène Delacroix (1798-1863) · 1840
A lifeboat drifts on a grey sea under a heavy sky, packed with the survivors of a wreck. Some lie exhausted over the gunwales, and in the centre a group huddles around a hat from which lots are being drawn. Delacroix took the scene from the second canto of Byron's Don Juan, where the starving castaways decide by lot who will be killed and eaten. The colour is almost drained away: greens, greys and dull browns, with a few touches of red and white on the figures, and the horizon is a thin band of light that promises nothing.
Delacroix painted the picture in eighteen forty and exhibited it at the Salon of eighteen forty one. The subject let him return, on a small scale and with twenty years more experience, to the theme of his great early canvases, the boat full of the doomed, from the Barque of Dante to Géricault's Raft of the Medusa. Look at the loose, sketch like handling of the waves and figures, closer to his private studies than to his official work. The painting was given to the Louvre in eighteen eighty three.
Did You Know? The survivors are drawing lots from a hat to decide who will be eaten first, exactly as Byron describes in the second canto of Don Juan.
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