(Ferdinand Victor) Eugène Delacroix

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Liberty Leading the People, oil on canvas by Eugène Delacroix, 1830; in the Louvre, … (credit: Giraudon/Art Resource, New York)

(born April 26, 1798, Charenton-Saint-Maurice, France — died Aug. 13, 1863, Paris) French painter. As a young man he was strongly influenced by the Romanticism of the painter Théodore Géricault and the Polish-born composer and pianist Frédéric Chopin. In 1822 he exhibited the painting Dante and Virgil in Hell, a landmark in the development of French 19th-century Romanticism. In his subsequent choice of subjects, Delacroix often showed an affinity with Lord Byron and other Romantic poets of his time. His work was characterized by an uninhibited expression of energy and movement, a fascination with violence, destruction, and the more tragic aspects of life, and a sensuous use of colour. After his success at the Paris Salon, he was commissioned to decorate government buildings; he became one of the most distinguished monumental mural painters in the history of French art. He explored the new medium of lithography and in 1827 executed 17 lithographs for an edition of Faust. In 1830 he painted Liberty Leading the People to commemorate the July Revolution that brought Louis-Philippe to the French throne. His use of colour influenced the development of Impressionism.

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The French painter Ferdinand Victor Eugène Delacroix (1798-1863) repudiated the neoclassic manner and developed a freer and more romantic style with a particular emphasis on color.

For 40 years Eugène Delacroix was one of the most prominent and controversial painters in France. Although the intense emotional expressiveness of his work placed the artist squarely in the midst of the general romantic outpouring of European art, he always remained an individual phenomenon and did not create a school. As a personality and as a painter, he was admired by the impressionists, postimpressionists, and symbolists who came after him.

Born on April 28, 1798, at Charenton-Saint-Maurice, the son of an important public official, Delacroix grew up in comfortable upper-middle-class circumstances in spite of the troubled times. He received a good classical education at the Lycée Impérial. He entered the studio of Pierre Narcisse Guérin in 1815, where he met Théodore Géricault.

Early Style

Delacroix's public career was launched with a flourish at the Salon of 1822, in which he exhibited Dante and Virgil in Hell. Large, somewhat hastily painted, still traditional in its bas-relief type of design, it was nevertheless novel in subject matter and in the emotional intensity conveyed by powerful, contorted forms and smoldering, vibrant tones.

Delacroix shared the new Anglophilia of French culture, played the role of a dandy, read Shakespeare, Byron, and Scott, visited England, and was impressed by English artists such as Richard Bonington and John Constable. Indeed, Constable's landscapes are supposed to have influenced Delacroix's Massacre at Chios, shown in 1824. An immense canvas, almost 14 feet high, it was obviously designed to create an impression at the Salon. Although Baron Gros called it "the massacre of painting," the government purchased it. Based on an incident in the Greek war of independence, the painting is as exotic as Delacroix's later North African pictures and is filled with a romantic taste for violence.

Among the dozen paintings Delacroix submitted to the Salon of 1827-1828, the immense, baroque Death of Sardanapalus, based on a theme by Byron, is remarkable for its theatrical fervor and luxuriant color. Liberty Leading the People, inspired by the Revolution of 1830, closed the first phase of Delacroix's career. It is almost the only important work, except for the Massacre at Chios, that had any connection with contemporary history: the scene was Parisian but the interpretation was allegorical.

Mature Style

The stimulus of a fortuitous 6-month trip to Morocco in 1832 had a lifelong effect on Delacroix's development and gave him an inexhaustible store of pictorial materials. The most immediate result was Women of Algiers in Their Apartment ( 1834), in which an Oriental subject allowed for the kind of "visual feast" and poetic effect that he always considered the proper aims of painting.

Also notable among the pictures of the 1830s and 1840s by Delacroix were historical scenes painted on commission, such as the Battle of Taillebourg (1837) and the Entry of the Crusaders into Constantinople (1840). They reflect his natural taste for the grand manner and for large-scale compositions, as well as his persistent enthusiasm for the dynamic style of Peter Paul Rubens and the mundane splendor of Paolo Veronese.

Those who believe that Delacroix turned back to classicism in the 1830s could point to his painting Medea (1838), a picture that could almost have been painted by Jacques Louis David. "I am a pure classic," Delacroix insisted at this time, only to confess in a paradoxical counter-statement, "If by romanticism they mean the free manifestation of my personal impressions … then I am a romantic and have been one since I was fifteen."

In 1833 Delacroix began his career as a mural painter, and in the next 28 years he executed paintings in Paris in the Chamber of Deputies (Palais-Bourbon), the Senate (Luxembourg Palace), the church of St-Denis-du-St-Sacrement, the Louvre, the City Hall, and St-Sulpice. Drawing heavily on classical and biblical themes and aided by assistants, he employed a technique in which the colors were mixed with wax. Although many of the subjects were traditional, the style in which they were carried out was full of romantic fire and excitement (Attila Hemicycle, finished 1847, Palais-Bourbon). In the ceiling panel of the Louvre, the Triumph of Apollo (1851), Delacroix achieved a highly successful baroque manner of his own. The murals are among the finest French decorative paintings.

Late Style

In the 1850s Delacroix's natural tendency toward freedom in the treatment of form and looseness of touch became more marked: Marphise (1852) and the sketch for Eurydice (1856) are good examples. Such works are reminiscent of the boldness of the late Titian - and of the late Auguste Renoir. Brilliance and luminosity of color increase; all forms are fused together in a dense pictorial whole.

There is an appreciable increase in Christian themes in the final period of Delacroix's career. "I was much impressed by the Requiem Mass," he wrote in his Journal (Nov. 2, 1854). "I thought of all that religion has to offer the imagination, and at the same time of its appeal to man's deepest feelings." The Christ on the Lake of Genesareth (1854) in Baltimore illustrates the rough-textured, agitated, and tumultuous style that often appeared in his final years of painting. This theme, which seems to have had a broad symbolic significance for the artist, must have become truly obsessive, for there are seven different versions of it.

In the last 10 or 12 years of his life Delacroix showed a renewed interest in the "pagan" North African subjects of his Moroccan experience of 1832. Among the most striking are the tiger and lion hunts and scenes of animal violence, which were created as much from imagination and from Rubens as from direct observation of animal behavior in Africa or Paris. Perhaps the sketch Lion Hunt (1854), done in preparation for a large painting in Bordeaux, is the most astonishing of these works. The wild, explosive design, created by fluid patches of warm color, has very properly been considered an anticipation of Fauvism.

Charles Baudelaire's enthusiastic praise of Delacroix's contribution to the Salon of 1859 was not enough to outweigh the bitter criticism. In any case, the painter decided not to exhibit at the Salon again. In 1861, disappointed by the poor response to his new mural paintings in St-Sulpice (Jacob Wrestling with the Angel), Delacroix wrote that he did not see much point in continuing with work that interested only 30 people in Paris. And yet, if he had been offered other commissions and had had the strength to do them, he would have gone on. By that time artistic work had become his only passion, his only solace. Two years later failing health overcame his determined will, and Delacroix died in Paris on Aug. 13, 1863.

Delacroix's Influence

In the early years of his career Delacroix found black a valuable "color." Later he said, "Gray is the enemy of all paintings"; and finally he wrote, "Banish all earth colors." Although he does not seem to have used a fully spectral palette, he moved in that direction, exploited complementary contrasts, and demonstrated the usefulness of separate touches and the possibility of constructing a picture by means of individual, interlacing brush-strokes and patches of color. These devices were developed further by the impressionists and postimpressionists. On the other hand, the symbolists followed Delacroix in the pictorial projection of inner, imaginative fantasies and in the abstractly expressive use of color.

Further Reading

Delacroix's Journal was translated by Walter Pach in 1937. Lucy Norton did another translation of the greater part of the Journal in 1951. The most comprehensive study of Delacroix is René Huyghe, Delacroix (trans. 1963). The best short account is Lee Johnson, Delacroix (1963). Independent in outlook, and with many unfamiliar comparative illustrations, is Frank A. Trapp, The Attainment of Delacroix (1970). Two excellent but more specialized books are George P. Mras, Eugène Delacroix's Theory of Art (1966), and Jack J. Spector, The Murals of Eugène Delacroix at Saint-Sulpice (1967).

Delacroix, Eugène (1798-1863). The leading representative of Romanticism in French painting, Delacroix applied his powerful imagination and audacious composition and use of colour to a huge range of subjects. He mastered one series of pictorial motifs and ideas after another: Italian and Flemish artists studied in the Louvre, British colourism and Romantic literature discovered through Bonington, North African subjects drawn from his visit there in 1832. From the 1830s onwards his mastery of traditional subject-matter and monumental form won him a series of major state commissions. Idolized by Baudelaire, who hailed him as ‘the true painter of the nineteenth century’ (Salon de 1846), Delacroix was the link between the Old Master tradition and the most contemporary problems of art theory and practice, of which his three-volume Journal is an essential text.

— James Kearns

Quotes:

"What makes men of genius, or rather, what they make, is not new ideas, it is that idea -- possessing them -- that what has been said has still not been said enough."

"If one considered life as a simple loan, one would perhaps be less exacting. We possess actually nothing; everything goes through us."

"What torments my soul is its loneliness. The more it expands among friends and the daily habits or pleasures, the more, it seems to me, it flees me and retires into its fortress. The poet who lives in solitude, but who produces much, is the one who enjoys those treasures we bear in our bosom, but which forsake us when we give ourselves to others. When one yields oneself completely to one's soul, it opens itself to one, and then it is that the capricious thing allows one the greatest of good fortunes... that of sympathizing with others, of studying itself, of painting itself constantly in its works."

"The artist who aims at perfection in everything achieves it in nothing."

"Artists who seek perfection in everything are those who cannot attain it in anything."

"Experience has two things to teach. The first is that we must correct a great deal and the second, that we must not correct too much."

See more famous quotes by Eugene Delacroix