Eugène Delacroix’s first literary illustrations were his seventeen images for Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Faust, made in the still relatively new medium of lithography. He was initially inspired by a theatrical production he saw in London in 1825 of the story of Dr. Faustus, a medieval German legend of a man who sells his soul to the devil in return for worldly pleasure and knowledge. The first image of the series, Mephistopheles in the Skies, makes evident Delacroix’s admiration for Goya’s Caprichos, published in 1799: compare this image with Goya’s etching Alla va eso from the Caprichos series, near the beginning of the exhibition. Goya himself was in France by the 1820s and also working in lithography, producing his masterpieces the Bulls of Bordeaux; Goya died the year Delacroix’s Faust was published.