If you want a gift over Christmas, treat yourself to the Delacroix exhibition now at the Metropolitan Museum. It’s a once in a lifetime chance to see the full range of the artist’s work — portraits, history paintings, early academic studies of the nude, oil sketches painted outdoors, paintings of animals, orientalist pictures inspired by his travels in North Africa, flower paintings and still-lifes, literary subjects, and monumental ceiling and church commissions.

Here, face to face, is the compleat artist, warts and all. At the Met, Delacroix gazes back at you with a hint of disdain in the idealized self-portrait, which I first saw in his last studio in the rue de Furstenberg at Paris. Though born in the 18th century, he is an “old master,” who lived long enough to be photographed and to experiment with painting models from photographs.

This exhibition offers a chance to experience Romanticism in French painting. From his friend Gericault, Delacroix absorbed a taste for Michelangelo and Rubens, and the two young artists helped launch a movement against the chilly neo-classicism handed down from David and exemplified by Ingres.

A small painting, “Mortally Wounded Brigand Quenches his Thirst,” shows an outlaw putting his lips to a rill while his blood stains the stream. This is much more affecting than the large “Agony in the Garden” nearby. I kept thinking of Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique, for this is a moment in which classical forms are dissolving in restlessness and superabundant feeling in literature, painting, and music. Both the composer and the painter reveled in the works of Shakespeare and Byron.

French painting had long shown a division between those favoring drawing, the Poussinistes, and those favoring color, the Rubenistes, and Ingres vs. Delacroix represented the opposites to an extreme. To Delacroix painting must be “a feast for the eye,” rich in coloristic effects, and express strong feeling above all.

In the version of “The Death of Sardanapalus,” showing the king lounging on his funeral bier while his concubines and horses are being slaughtered for immolation with himself, the “feast for the eye” verges on pandemonium it is so over-loaded with effects.

Rubens had painted battle scenes and hunts, evoking and updating Greco-Roman prototypes. Delacroix’s paintings of battles are not nearly as disturbing as the Dionysian frenzy of the lion hunts here. Lions are shredding horses and hunters, and the animals have a clear chance of winning and annihilating the humans.

Delacroix had an affinity for the big cats he studied and drew at the zoo. Wall text for the large painting of a “Young Tiger Playing with its Mother,” quotes a shrewd compliment about Delacroix’s cats: “That unusual artist has never painted a man who looks like a man in the way his tiger looks like a tiger.”

This show includes Delacroix 1840 painting showing the survivors of a disastrous shipwreck crowded in an open boat at the mercy of the elements. Byron’s Don Juan is the source of Delacroix’s vision. He has chosen the moment in which hunger and thirst drive the desperate survivors to draw lots to see who will be cannibalized to preserve the lives of the others. The lot falls to Don Juan’s beloved elderly tutor Pedrillo who makes the sacrifice and is eaten by everyone but Don Juan who is eventually the only survivor.

Delacroix’s journals are among the great treasures of art history. As a young artist, I found in them the conviction that painting, for all its sensuousness, is as high an intellectual pursuit as literature and philosophy. I read every book he discussed in his notes. I met Montaigne and others in his pages. Actual pages from his Journals are on display. Delacroix felt he was conversing with great writers when immersed in their works—and Delacroix is very much alive and present in this wonderful exhibition.

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Mr. Babb, an artist who is a master of cityscapes and forests, maintains his studio at Sumner Maine and is represented by Vose Galleries of Boston.

Image: Eugène Delacroix, (French, 1798–1863). The Shipwreck of Don Juan. 1840. Oil on canvas. 53 1/8 × 77 3/16 in. Musée du Louvre, Paris, Gift of Adolphe Moreau, 1883. © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY. Photo: Gerard Blot