The 1852 canvas The Sea from the Heights of Dieppe demonstrates Delacroix’s importance for the Impressionists. The rapidity of the brushstrokes prefigures the works of the en plein air school to follow. The thick, dramatic brush work and intense colour tones would have a lasting impression on the works of Monet, Renoir and Cézanne. Although Delacroix is chiefly remembered for his mythological and grand themed canvases, in his later years he took great delight in depicting flowers and landscapes, painting these less ambitious works at his leisure, enjoying the changing spectacles of daylight, seascapes, nocturnal scenes and foliage. The artist’s friend, the novelist George Sand, once described how she walked in on him, “ecstatic in delight before a yellow lily whose beautiful architecture he had just apprehended.” Another friend noted how she he had once discovered him “prowling around rose bushes.”