In 1963, traveling as students used to during the summer vacation, I found myself in Paris in time for the large exhibition organized by the Louvre to commemorate the centennial of the death of Eugène Delacroix (1798-1863). I am sorry to report that this can be described only as a Significant Waste. As an art-history major, I dutifully visited the show, but I simply wasn’t up to it. I was too young, too ignorant, too uninformed to deal with all that Romantic intensity. It seemed excessive, faintly embarrassing. My favorite Old Masters, at the time, were Uccello and Piero della Francesca, although I also har bored a remarkable enthusiasm for de Koon ing in his Pink Angels phase; some things you outgrow. I hadn’t seen enough, lived long enough, or looked hard enough at enough art to make the kind of associations Delacroix demands. Unable to grasp what he had to say about the tradition of Western painting, indeed about painting itself, I got bogged down in the theatricality and the flamboy ance and missed the point. And the intense color I expected from what I had read about Delacroix and from his Journals simply wasn’t visible through the yellowed varnish of the large-format pictures, in the Louvre’s mediocre lighting. (I remember going off to look at that spooky, over-sized fifteenth-century icon, the Pieta of Villeneuve-les-Avignon, after the Delacroix show, as an anti dote.)

It wasn’t until some years later that I began to discover just what