Revolutionaries are supposed to be outsiders. Eugène Delacroix broke the rigid rules of neoclassical art and became the leader of French Romanticism while quietly backed by the highest levels of the French establishment. This episode examines the open secret of his likely paternity, the powerful foreign minister Talleyrand, and how anonymous commissions and state purchases gave a supposedly destitute orphan an invisible safety net that let him be a rebel on canvas without starving in the street.

We follow his career from the scandalous 1822 debut of The Barque of Dante through the unflinching civilian suffering of The Massacre at Chios and the sensuous destruction of The Death of Sardanapalus, to Liberty Leading the People, which the government bought and then hid away for nearly two decades because its message seemed too dangerous. We trav ...