When Paul Cézanne painted Medea, after Delacroix around 1880, he was not merely copying a celebrated Romantic composition—he was grappling with the legacy of Eugène Delacroix, whose own Medea had scandalized Paris in 1838 with its raw violence and psychological intensity. Cézanne’s fascination with Delacroix’s bold color and dramatic brushwork was well known among his contemporaries; in fact, he once declared, “All this luminous color, it seems to me that it comes from Delacroix.” The painting stands as one of the rare moments when Cézanne, the so-called father of modern art, openly paid homage to a predecessor, revealing the deep influence of Romanticism on his early career. The story Cézanne chose to retell is among the darkest in Greek myth. Medea, betrayed by her lover Jason, stands moments before the unthinkable: the murder of her own children.

In Cézanne’s version, the mother’s body forms a tense, protective barrier, arms outstretched as her terrified sons cower at her feet. The space is claustrophobic, the colors brooding, the brushwork agitated—each element amplifies the sense of impending doom. Unlike Delacroix, who bathed his Medea in a tempest of swirling reds and golds, Cézanne’s palette is more subdued, his forms more sculptural, as if to freeze the horror in a moment of dreadful clarity. The precise medium of Medea, after Delacroix remains uncertain, as does much of its early history.

It was painted during a period when Cézanne was largely working in isolation in Provence, far from the Parisian art world, and few records survive of its initial exhibition or sale. Today, the painting is recognized as a key work from Cézanne’s so-called “dark period,” when he often revisited dramatic literary and mythological subjects. It marks an important step in his journey from Romantic influence toward the radical innovations that would define his later years and shape the future of Modernism.