Patrick Noon

When he wasn’t able to travel to Champrosay anymore because he was too ill, he found great comfort in his garden. And this garden became somewhat of a famous place for younger artists to visit because his studio was still there after he died, and you could still get into the studio while his housekeeper was still alive. And a lot of times the artists would try to get in and experience the studio and the garden and Monet and Bazille actually rented a studio that overlooked Delacroix’s for about a year right after Delacroix’s death.

When these were shown in 1849, they were really praised as bravura examples of pure painting. And I think subsequent artists’ fascination with them was because of that. And they tried to either own or copy or meditate on these things, Degas for instance was collecting the still-life sketches. And Cézanne very fairly late in life wanted to acquire this and did acquire a very important large Delacroix watercolor of a floral arrangement when he was just so fascinated by this particular watercolor that he traded some pictures with the dealer Vollard to acquire it, and then he made a copy of it, an oil copy, for himself.