Just around the corner from the Saint-Germain cafes, the Parisian haunts where Sartre and De Beauvoir used to hold court is the lovely little Place Furstenberg. Here the romantic painter Eugene Delacroix lived in a house that has since been converted into a museum. It's a lovely spot to visit in the Parisian spring, with a quiet blossoming garden and a delightful atelier. Admittedly the painting we've come to see concerns a mother about to stab her children to death in order to enrage her husband, but it's still a pleasant outing.
The exhibition Medee Furieuse ("Furious Medea") brings Delacroix's still shocking painting of the murderous demi-god of a sorceress to Paris for the first time in ages. It's been moved from Lille to the Musee National Eugene Delacroix in Paris to be hung in his atelier in a fine historical exhibition that displays studies for and later versions of the work.
The exhibition is well timed. Paris has been awash in Medea studies since Isabelle Huppert brought her Avignon festival production of Euripides' play to the French capital recently. There's even a Medea musical.
The 1838 canvas, which outraged and entranced the salon of the same year, is the centrepiece of this exhibition. It's flanked by two versions Delacroix painted for rich people shortly before his death in 1863.
Delacroix had a thing about breasts. You can see that in the proud bosom of Liberty Leading the People (at the Louvre), or in the remarkable embonpoint of one woman in The Death of Sardanapalus (Louvre also). But Medee Furieuse, while maintaining the breast fixation, is less vividly coloured and less deliriously composed than such works. For his first mythological subject Delacroix became restrained, classical and reminiscent of the other leading French painter of his day, Ingres.
Intriguingly, in the preparatory drawings for Medee Furieuse, the heads of her two children cover her breasts as though they were taking a suck for one last time before she dispatches them. In the final painting, however, the children's heads slump below her bosoms and are half throttled by their mother's arm. We catch the terrified eye of one child looking directly at us. While Medea's right arm holds the pair tight, the left hand clutches a dagger.
It's a wonderful gesture - at once maternally protective and unnaturally brutal. We see Medea's profile as she looks out of her cave in panic; she might almost be a protective mother holing up from some unseen threat. But in fact she is the threat - the wild animal - and her panic surely concerns what she is about to do.
Better yet, the sun is penetrating the cave, leaving only the top of Medea's head in shade. In Delacroix's painting, the line between dark and light races diagonally from an inch up her noble nose to the tip of her ear, making her look like a helmeted warrior - a female Achilles overwhelmed by ruthless rage. A fantastic painting.
Medee Furieuse is at the Musee National Eugene Delacroix in Paris until July 30th.