PARIS, FRANCE.-The Musée du Louvre presents sixty works (drawings, watercolors, pastels, and sketchbooks), selected from its own collection, by one of France’s greatest painters, Eugène Delacroix (1798-1863). At the centre of the exhibition, on view for the very first time, is an exceptional private album, a "national treasure" recently acquired by the Louvre thanks to the support of Lusis, a French software developer and IT consulting firm, under the new tax regime benefiting businesses contributing to the preservation of French national heritage, established as a result of the French Law of January 4, 2002 and its provisions concerning national museums.
"Eugène Delacroix, the Louvre drawings" follows upon earlier exhibitions of drawings by Michelangelo, Lorenzo di Credi, Fragonard, and Ingres. It is also scheduled to coincide with the exhibition “Dante and Virgil in the Inferno by Eugène Delacroix.” Delacroix’s drawings are to those of Mr. Ingres as fire is to ice." Théophile Silvestre, Documents nouveaux (Paris: M. Lévy, 1864)
The exhibition curator is Arlette Sérullaz, chief curator in the Department of Graphic Arts, Musée du Louvre, Director of the Eugène Delacroix Museum. Publications related to the event include Delacroix by Arlette Sérullaz and A 5 Continents co-edited by the Musée du Louvre.