Eugène Delacroix was born into a wealthy family, being the son of Charles Delacroix, a Minister under the Directoire and later a Prefect, and of Victoire Oeben. Both his parents died when he was still very young. He entered the studio of Pierre Guérin in 1815, where he met Théodore Géricault and he came into contact with Richard Parks Bonington while studying old masters in the Louvre. In 1816 he enrolled in the École des Beaux-Arts where his education was strongly influenced by the formal neoclassical style of Jacques-Louis David. Delacroix, however, developed a fancy for the colourful, painterly style of earlier masters, in particular Peter Paul Rubens and Paolo Veronese. Delacroix’s friend Géricault also had a decisive influence on his early works. His career began in 1822 when the Paris Salon accepted his first picture. He was innovative in his choice of subject matter, favouring themes formerly untreated, often drawn from literature and contemporary events set in the Near East. A visit in 1825 to England further nurtured his broad interest in foreign literature, especially Byron and Shakespeare and made him acquainted with the English artists Sir Thomas Lawrence, David Wilkie and Willem Etty. A highly influential trip to Spain, Morocco and Algeria in 1832 provided him with an entire new array of themes and motifs to which he was drawn for the rest of his life. However, during the following decades it was mostly literary themes that attracted his attention.