Eugène Delacroix

French painter

• Born: April 26, 1798
• Birthplace: Charenton-Saint-Maurice, France
• Died: August 13, 1863
• Place of death: Paris, France

A powerful colorist, Delacroix became the most important figure in the development of the Romantic painting movement in France in the nineteenth century. He was a prolific artist and sought to stir viewers deeply by appealing to their senses even though he chose to explore the dark side of their human emotions.

Early Life

Eugène Delacroix (dah-lah-krwah) was the son of a schoolteacher, Charles Delacroix, who rose to become minister of foreign affairs in 1795 under the revolutionary regime and French ambassador to the Netherlands some eighteen months later. Delacroix’s mother, Victoire Oeben, descended from a distinguished family of royal cabinetmakers. Controversy surrounds Eugène’s paternity. Some scholars maintain that his biological father was Talleyrand, one of Europe’s most brilliant statesmen, to whom the artist is said to have borne a striking resemblance.

While in Marseilles as a result of an administrative appointment for his father, Charles, the young Eugène exhibited a precocious talent for piano and violin. His legal father died in late 1805, and Eugène’s mother moved the family back to Paris and enrolled Eugène at the Lycée Imperial, one of the best schools in the capital. There Delacroix excelled in Latin, Greek, and drawing. He also furthered his drawing skills by copying prints in the manner of the English caricaturist James Gillray, a practice that shaped a career-long habit of seeking expressions of character and animated gestures. When not yet eleven, Eugène had a fateful experience—a visit to the Louvre on one of his free days. The sight of such pictorial variety, scale, and technical mastery caused him to decide upon a painting career.

When Delacroix was seventeen, his career goal was aided by an introduction to Pierre-Narcisse Guérin, a successful painter and follower of Jacques-Louis David, head of the neoclassical movement in art and practically an art dictator under Napoleon I. In Guérin’s atelier, Delacroix drew rigorously, learning human anatomy from classical references. He enjoyed working on large historical compositions involving faraway battles. While there he met Théodore Géricault, once a Guérin pupil. The young Delacroix felt an immediate kinship with Géricault’s ideas of infusing French art with sensuousness plus an insistence upon spontaneity. Unfortunately, Delacroix was forced to withdraw from Guérin’s atelier after only six months, probably because he could not afford the cost of tuition.

In 1816, Delacroix enrolled at the École des Beaux Arts. Orthodoxy ruled at this government-patronized school where all students progressed in basically the same manner. The primary methodology, like that for Guérin’s classroom, was the study of classical form through seemingly endless copying of antique imagery from plaster casts, sculpture busts, coins, and, finally, male and female models. Delacroix was responsive to such instruction, but concurrently he searched for flexibility of expression and, on his own, explored the print-making mediums of etching and engraving as well as the new print form lithography.

Delacroix’s growing need for emotional release was soon met by the emergence of a friendship with Géricault. The timing could not have been more propitious, as the slightly older Géricault was embarking on a sensational large work, The Raft of the Medusa (1819). Its subject, chosen to embarrass the restored monarchy of France with the hope of possibly becoming a success by scandal, depicts the moment of the initial sighting of the above-mentioned raft by a passing ship on the Atlantic horizon. The raft contained a dozen or so men who had survived twelve days adrift, their two ropes connected to lifeboats having been mysteriously cut within a day of abandoning the stranded and broken frigate Medusa.

The ship had been on its way to Senegal with about four hundred passengers before running aground off the West African coast, thanks to an incompetent captain. Delacroix posed for the seminude figure lying face down near the edge of the raft in the central foreground. Though The Raft of the Medusa was overpoweringly raw, it proved to be the emotional elixir Delacroix was seeking. He may have been marked by its example, for his best paintings subsequently dealt with cruelty and death.

As with other artists falling under the perplexing umbrella of Romanticism, Delacroix’s appearance and manner could be misleading. By age twenty, his aristocratic lineage was evident in his stiff posture and finely etched features. Fashion-conscious, he was one of the first to introduce the English-cut suit to Parisians, and to many people Delacroix was a pretentious dandy. However, some historians suggest that the artist’s elegant attire and fine manners were used to mock France’s increasingly industrialized society, which he thought was crassly hopeful in its newfound material prosperity.

Delacroix also had a withdrawn and pessimistic nature, which he cultivated further by emulating the melancholic pathos in Dante’s poetry and the works of George Gordon, Lord Byron . By contrast, the painter’s work Delacroix most admired from the past was that of Peter Paul Rubens, whose high-keyed colors and dramatic action enthralled him. However, it was Lord Byron who became a personal hero with a personality profile containing passion, bravery, elegance, melancholy, a love of freedom, and pessimism.

Life’s Work

Desiring a successful career in painting, which in his day meant salon acceptance, Delacroix began a salon entry in 1821, one that would ideally attract critical reviews but not a storm of controversy. Touched by reading The Inferno from Dante’s The Divine Comedy, he selected an episode from Canto VIII. Known by various titles, for example, Dante and Virgil Crossing the Styx and The Bark of Dante, the 1822 painting simulated the emotional potential and large scale of Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa, still fresh in Delacroix’s memory. Unfortunately, polite taste, long accustomed to contained forms, polished technique, and clarity of color and values, was not ready for the ambiguous spaces and murky tones of Delacroix’s painting.

Something more troublesome than salon taste marked Delacroix’s subsequent career, namely the fact that many of his best paintings depicted injury, frenzy, and killing. He did not need to wait long for those types of thematic opportunities. In 1822, as many as twenty thousand Greeks on the island of Chios in the eastern Mediterranean were killed by invading Turks. Delacroix seized the chance to compose a potentially sensational work riding the crest of public interest in the war. Called The Massacre at Chios (“and the massacre of painting” by some of his contemporaries), it would seem to have been intended as a history set piece, except that the artist was basically apolitical.

A chance encounter with three landscape paintings by English Romantic painter John Constable at a Paris picture gallery may ultimately have been as important to Delacroix’s subject and stylistic development as the gruesome massacre imagery. The artist noticed the application of color in bright flecks and dabs. Then he tested Constable’s choppy, unblended color strokes and found, as did Constable, that a viewer’s eyes mix the colors. The effects are not as crucial as Delacroix’s intentions, which was not fidelity to atmospheric conditions but a contribution to a depressing mood combining murder and eroticism. From that point onward, color and a more vigorous painting method played a larger role in his art.

The Massacre at Chios shocked conservatives but enraptured youthful artists. It also stimulated Delacroix to explore more themes of death with erotic overtones. In fact, an immediate exploration of that sort was his entry for the 1827 Salon. Known as The Death of Sardanapolus , it was inspired by a Lord Byron play based upon the suicide of an Assyrian prince whom Byron named Sardanapolus. That world-weary aesthete choreographed his own conflagration as a final work of art. Through Byron, Delacroix illustrated the sickening preparations for the prince’s funerary pyre, during which Sardanapolus watches without remorse as his favorite wives, horses, and dogs are killed in front of him by his officers.

The Death of Sardanapolus suffered disapproval by the press, and the French government refused to purchase it. Delacroix was warned by the head of the Academy of Fine Arts to refrain from painting any more like it for a long time lest he become ineligible for state commissions. Luckily for the artist, new officials, eager to overthrow the tastes of their predecessors, came to power in the aftermath of the July revolution of 1830. Delacroix was soon in their good graces, and one of his few political paintings, Liberty Leading the People , was finished by late 1830. This painting became a much-copied icon of revolutionary propaganda, with versions appearing often as posters well into the twentieth century. It was born of a public uprising in Paris that Delacroix witnessed but in which he did not participate because, even here, he had little faith in the proletariat.

In Liberty Leading the People, a ragged army surges forward, stumbling over a barricade of paving stones, debris, and fallen comrades. They are led by a solidly built, resolute, young bare-breasted woman (Liberty), who holds a musket in her left hand and raises the flag of France with her right hand. The conflict stemmed from unresolved grievances of the revolution in 1789 plus retrogressive decrees in July of 1830 by King Charles X, which dissolved the Chamber of Deputies, suspended freedom of the press, and overturned the voting rights of the merchant class and the new industrialists. Delacroix seemed to express perfectly the collective sentiment of the Parisians in revolt, perhaps even the universal will of ordinary citizens to revolt against intolerable conditions. However, those were not his intentions. Nevertheless, the artist valued most the French flag defiantly raised by the spirit of Liberty, which was returned to the north tower of Notre Dame on July 28, 1832, and is visible at the extreme right of the composition.

The year 1832 was a turning point in Delacroix’s development, for at that time he accepted an invitation to accompany Count Charles de Mornay on a goodwill trip to Morocco. The artist was asked to record picturesque events of a treaty-exploring journey that followed the recent French takeover of neighboring Algeria. In North Africa, Delacroix hoped to find brilliant colors, sensuality, and ferocity. Instead, he observed civility, dignity, simple lifestyles, and a sense of unbroken traditions. From the first day ashore, he began to fill sketchbooks with drawings, watercolor vignettes, written notes on color, and descriptive details of his discoveries such as bright robes, exotic women, and non-European types of buildings. A short trip to Algiers was just as fruitful, for, once there, he realized a fantasy of long standing—entry into a harem. Two years after completing his North African trip, Delacroix produced an enchanting work drawn from that rare experience, Algerian Women in Their Quarters . In it, reverie and sensuality are fused and suspended.

The diaries and sketchbooks Delacroix filled sustained his art until his death in 1863. Equally remarkable is the fact that, despite the time lapse between the 1834 watercolor studies and the paintings derived from them, the latter did not lack freshness. The most popular works best typify Delacroix’s taste for violence and cruelty: The Lion Hunt (1861) and Arabs Skirmishing in the Mountains (1862). For almost three decades, beginning during the 1830’s, Delacroix was also involved with commissions sponsored by the government for major public buildings. There were church commissions, too. Altogether, they were exactly the type of employment to which most artists aspired at the time. Noteworthy contracts included wall and ceiling compositions at the National Assembly-Paris, the Luxembourg Palace (1845-1846), the Apollo Gallery at the Louvre (1850-1851), and the Church of Saint-Sulpice (1856-1861). Delacroix’s last years were marked by failing health while he worked on these large projects. He died in 1863 in Paris after willing nearly six thousand works to public sale.

Significance

Eugène Delacroix became the leading figure of the Romantic movement of painting in France and did so without trying. Actually, he may not have seen himself as a leader of anything. Like a number of major figures in art during his life, he was an enigma fraught with contradictions. For example, his thematic preferences ran quickly to scenes of high drama on the seas and depictions of fierce animal combat. Ironically, it was the gentle Algerian Women in Their Quarters that was later much admired, copied, and assimilated by artists of such stature as Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Paul Cézanne, Henri Matisse, and Pablo Picasso.

Delacroix’s output was phenomenal, including 850 paintings, hundreds of watercolors, about sixty sketchbooks, many lithographs, thousands of drawings, a three-volume journal, and the beginnings of a dictionary of the fine arts. Furthermore, Delacroix, so full of energy, so prolific in his career, so strong-willed, seemingly had little faith in civilization. His pessimism, which was at first cultivated as a badge of distinction, eventually enveloped him like an unwelcomed, unshakable cloak. He is remembered as a rich colorist who painted dark themes. Delacroix died in 1863. By then Romanticism had been eclipsed by Édouard Manet’s unvarnished naturalism in the 1863 Salon, which would lead to the emergence of the next major painting movement, Impressionism.

Bibliography

Delacroix, Eugène. The Journal of Eugène Delacroix. Translated by Walter Pach. New York: Crown, 1948. The first English translation of the artist’s thoughts recorded intermittently from 1822 to 1832 and from 1847 to 1863. Perhaps the most relished entries are his impressions of a six-month trip to North Africa in 1832. Delacroix’s intentions toward his own art will be appreciated by those seeking to understand his state of mind when he worked on key paintings.

Fraser, Elisabeth A. Delecroix, Art, and Patrimony in Post-Revolutionary France. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Focuses on the paintings Delacroix created during the Bourbon Restoration. Fraser maintains these paintings were an attempt to reconcile the political turmoil of the French Revolution with subsequent events occurring during the Restoration. Delacroix’s art, she argues, was as much influenced by the monarchy as it was by his earlier resistance to it.

Grigsby, Darcy Grimaldo. Extremities: Painting Empire in Post-Revolutionary France. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2002. Analyzes six paintings by four artists, including Delacroix’s The Massacre at Chios and Greece on the Ruins of Missolonghi. Grigsby argues these paintings depict the history and politics of the French colonial empire, an empire that forced painters who previously advocated freedom to depict slavery and cultural and racial differences.

Huyghe, René. Delacroix. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1963. One of the best books on Delacroix to appear in English. Huyghe skillfully weaves quotations from the artist’s journal and statements from Delacroix’s contemporaries with his own observations. Illustrations of key paintings are analyzed diagrammatically, stressing the compositional structure in Delacroix’s aesthetics. Important themes or works in series are suitably illustrated in black and white as preparatory drawings, multiple painted versions, and lithographs.

Johnson, Lee. The Paintings of Eugène Delacroix: A Critical Catalogue, 1816-1831. 2 vols. Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1981. A publication of major importance. The first attempt at a complete compilation of Delacroix’s paintings since the basic effort by Alfred Robaut in 1885. Johnson covers the artist’s formative period and his early salon successes. He airs new data regarding problems of dating paintings, presents paintings absent in Robaut’s books, offers new biographical information on several of Delacroix’s portrait subjects, and relates pertinent drawings to their respective paintings.

Le Bris, Michel. Romantics and Romanticism. New York: Rizzoli, 1981. An intriguing and well-illustrated study of Romanticism as an international movement with roots in literature and folklore. By stressing themes and contextual tendencies, the book separates itself from watered-down profiles and superficial catalogs. Nineteenth century Romantic tendencies aptly explored include the appetite for death and pessimism, the desire to experience non-Western cultures, the yearning for lost worlds, and phantoms and the deadly sublime.

Néret, Gilles. Eugène Delacroix, 1798-1863: The Prince of Romanticism. Cologne, Germany: Taschen, 1999. A concise overview of Delacroix’s life and an analysis of his art. One of the volumes in the Basic Art Series.

Prideaux, Tom. The World of Delacroix. Alexandria, Va.: Time-Life Books, 1966. A cultural-historical approach is used in this book, placing Delacroix’s art within the artistic and historical currents of his time. Prideaux weaves biography, politics and revolution, the painter’s craft, and pedagogical issues into an engaging and lively text.

Trapp, Frank A. The Attainment of Delacroix. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1970. An ambitious book that addresses the artist’s major works in dutiful fashion. The author’s primary interests lie in Delacroix’s paintings from literary sources and in themes from past history and current events. The last two chapters, which are entitled “Theory and Practice” and “Delacroix and His Critics,” are perhaps the most welcome.

Wright, Beth S., ed. The Cambridge Companion to Delacroix. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Collection of essays aimed at providing students with an introduction to Delacroix’s life and work. Some of the essays examine Delacroix’s artistic technique, his aesthetics, his writing, his relationship to the Romantic movement, and his impact on art and culture in the nineteenth century.