Delacroix, Eugène

▪ French artist

Introduction

in full  Ferdinand-Eugène-Victor Delacroix 

born April 26, 1798, Charenton-Saint-Maurice, France

died August 13, 1863, Paris

      the greatest French Romantic painter, whose use of colour was influential in the development of both Impressionist (Impressionism) and Post-Impressionist (Post-Impressionism) painting. His inspiration came chiefly from historical or contemporary events or literature, and a visit to Morocco in 1832 provided him with further exotic subjects.

Early life

      Delacroix was the fourth child of Victoire Oeben, a descendant of the Oeben-Riesener family, which had created furniture for the French king and court in the 17th and 18th centuries, and of Charles Delacroix, a government official, who was ambassador to Holland in 1798 and who died in 1805 while prefect of Bordeaux. One theory attributes Eugène's true paternity to the statesman Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord. This belief is strengthened both by Delacroix's strong physical resemblance to Talleyrand and by the fact that the future painter would consistently receive important patronage from the French government despite the nonconformist character of his art.

      Whatever the truth of his parentage, Delacroix's childhood was untroubled, and he would always maintain great affection and admiration for his father. Up to age 17 he pursued classical studies. Within his distinguished and artistic family, he formed a passion for music and the theatre. In 1815 he became the pupil of a renowned academic painter, Baron Pierre-Narcisse Guérin (Guérin, Pierre-Narcisse, Baron). He knew the historical painter Antoine-Jean Gros (Gros, Antoine-Jean, Baron), and as a young man he visited the salon of the royalist and painter Baron François Gérard (Gérard, François, Baron). As early as 1822 he received the backing of Adolphe Thiers (Thiers, Adolphe), the statesman and historian, who, as interior minister in the 1830s, put Delacroix in charge of architectural decorations.

      A child of his century, Delacroix was affected by the Romanticism of the painter Théodore Géricault (Géricault, Théodore) and of friends such as the English painter Richard Parkes Bonington (Bonington, Richard Parkes), the Polish-born composer and pianist Frédéric Chopin (Chopin, Frédéric), and the French writer George Sand (Sand, George). He did not, however, take part in the battles of the Romantic movement waged by Victor Hugo (Hugo, Victor), Hector Berlioz (Berlioz, Hector), and others.

Development of mature style

      Delacroix's debut at the Paris Salon of 1822, in which he exhibited his first masterpiece, Dante and Virgil in Hell, is one of the landmarks in the development of French 19th-century Romantic painting. Dante and Virgil in Hell was inspired by Dante's Divine Comedy, but its tragic feeling and the powerful modeling of its figures are reminiscent of Michelangelo, and its rich colour shows the influence of Peter Paul Rubens (Rubens, Peter Paul). Among Delacroix's contemporaries, Géricault, who was the young painter's best friend until his sudden death in 1824, was also important.

      In his subsequent choice of subjects, Delacroix showed an affinity with Lord Byron (Byron, George Gordon Byron, 6th Baron) and other Romantic poets of his time, and he also drew subjects from Dante, William Shakespeare, and medieval history. In 1824, however, he exhibited at the Salon the Massacre at Chios, a large canvas depicting the dramatic contemporary massacre of Greeks by Turks on the island of Chios. The nature of his talent is evident in the unity he achieved in his expression of the haughty pride of the conquerors, the horror as well as despair of the innocent Greeks, and the splendour of a vast sky.

      Delacroix had already become interested in the delicate technique of his English painter friends Richard Parkes Bonington and the Fielding brothers (Thales, Copley, Theodore, and Newton), and he also admired the English landscapes of John Constable (Constable, John), which were exhibited in Paris in 1824. Indeed, the luminous tonalities evident in the Massacre at Chios are said to have been inspired by Constable's style. To round out his technical and cultural education, Delacroix left for London in 1825. There his technique, developed by contact with J.M.W. Turner (Turner, J.M.W.), Constable, and Sir Thomas Lawrence (Lawrence, Sir Thomas), acquired the freedom and suppleness that until then he had been admiring in Rubens and striving to achieve for himself.

      Between 1827 and 1832, Delacroix produced masterpieces in quick succession. Chief among them is The Death of Sardanapalus (1827), a violent and voluptuous Byronic subject in which women, slaves, animals, jewels, and rich fabrics are combined in a sensuous but somewhat incoherent scene. One of his finest paintings on historical subjects, The Execution of the Doge Marino Faliero (1826–27), dates from this period as do two works on medieval history, The Battle of Nancy (1831) and The Battle of Poitiers (1830). He also painted the typically Byronic subject of Combat Between the Giaour and the Pasha (1827). Like Géricault, Delacroix explored the newly invented medium of lithography and made a set of 17 lithographs (1827) illustrating a French edition of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Faust.

      In 1830 Delacroix painted Liberty Leading the People to commemorate the July Revolution that had just brought Louis-Philippe to the French throne. This large canvas mixes allegory with contemporary realism in a highly successful and monumental manner and is still perhaps the most popular of all Delacroix's paintings. The relatively subdued manner of Liberty Leading the People also reflects a change in Delacroix's style, which became somewhat more quiet while still retaining elements of animation and grandeur.

      From January to July 1832, Delacroix toured in Algeria, Spain, and Morocco with the comte de Mornay, King Louis-Philippe's diplomatic representative to the sultan. Morocco proved to be a revelation to Delacroix, who found in its people and way of life the Homeric nobility and beauty that he had never seen in French academic Neoclassicism itself. The sights of exuberant nature and the beauty of the horses, the Arabs and their flowing costumes, would henceforth inspire his visual memory, even in his last works. Delacroix made copious sketches and notes during the trip and used them to good effect upon his return to Paris. After Morocco his drawing and paint handling became freer and his use of colour even more sumptuous. The first fruits of his Moroccan impressions are collected in Women of Algiers in Their Apartment (1834), in which three sumptuously costumed Arab women and their surroundings are portrayed in a blaze of exquisitely warm colour harmonies. Delacroix's other recapitulations of his North African experiences include Fanatics of Tangier (1838) and Jewish Wedding (1839). He continued to paint Arab subjects almost to the end of his life.

Building decoration

      In the latter part of his career, Delacroix was favoured with a string of important commissions to decorate government buildings. His first commission, in 1833–36, was to paint a group of murals for the Salon du Roi at the Palais-Bourbon. He was subsequently commissioned to decorate the ceiling of the Library of the Palais-Bourbon (1838–47), the Library of the Palais du Luxembourg (1840–47), the ceiling of the Galerie d'Apollon at the Louvre (1850), the Salon de la Paix at the Hotel de Ville (1849–53; burned in 1871), and the Chapel of the Holy Angels in the Church of Saint-Sulpice (1849–61). His murals represent the last great effort of this kind in the tradition of the Baroque ceiling painters.

      During this period Delacroix also painted several canvases on the largest scale of his career, notably two for the museum of history at Versailles: The Battle of Taillebourg (1837) and Entry of the Crusaders into Constantinople (1840). Among his later easel paintings are ones on Arab, religious, and classical subjects and several superb scenes of wild animals and hunts, among them the Lion Hunt of 1858 and the Lion Hunt of 1861. Delacroix painted several notable self-portraits during the course of his long career and occasionally produced portraits of such friends as Chopin and Sand (both in 1838).

      Delacroix died in 1863, leaving more than 6,000 drawings, watercolours, and prints to be sold. His Journals are among the most penetrating of artists' notebooks since those kept by Leonardo da Vinci. A selective edition of them in English by Hubert Wellington was published in 1951 as The Journal of Eugène Delacroix.

      With Turner, Delacroix was the forerunner of the bold technical innovations that strongly influenced the development of Impressionism and subsequent modernist movements. The uninhibited expression of energy and movement in his works, his fascination with violence, destruction, and the more tragic aspects of life, and the sensuous virtuosity of his colouring have helped make him one of the most fascinating and complex artistic figures of the 19th century.

René Huyghe Ed.

Additional Reading

There are several general life-and-work studies on Delacroix, including Lee Johnson, Delacroix (1963), which provides a concise, fundamental introduction to Delacroix's colour theory; Barthélémy Jobert, Delacroix (1997), which is handsomely illustrated; and Charles Baudelaire, Eugéne Delacroix: His Life and Work, trans. by Joseph M. Bernstein (1947), which provides a valuable contemporary account of the artist.André Joubin (ed.), Correspondance générale d'Eugène Delacroix, 5 vol. (1935–38), contains Delacroix's letters; it is supplemented by Lee Johnson (ed.), Eugène Delacroix: Further Correspondence, 1817–1863 (1991). Also of note is Eugène Delacroix, The Journal of Eugene Delacroix, trans. by Walter Pach (1937, reissued 1948; originally published in French, 1893). Alfred Robaut, L'Oeuvre complet de Eugène Delacroix: peintures, dessins, gravurs, lithographies (1885, reprinted 1969), remains the standard, comprehensive source on the artist's work. Catalogs of individual media include Lee Johnson, The Paintings of Eugène Delacroix: A Critical Catalogue, 6 vol. (1981–89), and Delacroix: Pastels (1995); Loys Delteil, Delacroix, the Graphic Work: A Catalogue Raisonné, trans. and rev. by Susan Strauber (1997; originally published in French, 1908); and Maurice Sérullaz, Dessins d'Eugène Delacroix, 1798–1863, 2 vol. (1984).Focused studies on single aspects of Delacroix's career include Maurice Sérullaz et al., Delacroix in Morocco (1994; also published in French, 1994), which provides deep insight into the artist's journey to Africa, featuring superb illustrations and a consideration of “the Orient”; Jack J. Spector, The Murals of Eugene Delacroix at Saint-Sulpice (1967), and Delacroix: The Death of Sardanapalus (1974); and Michele Hannoosh, Painting and the Journal of Eugène Delacroix (1995). The long-neglected yet significant mature phase of Delacroix's career has been brought into perspective in Arlette Sérullaz et al., Delacroix: The Late Work (1998).

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