This is the Royal Academy’s year. The venerable London institution has celebrated its 250th anniversary by unveiling a redevelopment that has added seventy per cent more public space, staging a Summer Exhibition that has garnered five-star reviews, mounting an exhibition, The Great Spectacle, which traces the history of the annual exhibition since its inception in 1768, and publishing a monumental multi-author history of itself and its collections.1

The last few years have seen a remarkable upsurge in exhibitions and scholarly studies on Eugène Delacroix. In 2013–14, Delacroix and the Matter of Finish was shown at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art and the Birmingham Museum of Art, Alabama, and in 2015–16 Delacroix and the Rise of Modern Art was mounted by the Minneapolis Institute of Art and the National Gallery, London.1