Chap. 29 - Painter Eugène Delacroix

Eugène Delacroix


Ferdinand Victor Eugène Delacroix, b. Apr. 26, 1798, d. Aug. 13, 1863, was the leading exponent of romantic painting in France (see romanticism). In 1815 he entered the studio of the neoclassical painter Pierre Narcisse Guérin, where he met Théodore Géricault, a romantic painter by whom he was much influenced.
At the 1824 Salon he admired John Constable's English landscapes, which reintroduced into France the baroque coloristic tradition that the neoclassical painters had earlier discarded.

Characteristic of Delacroix's pictures is unresolved tension and a romantic obsession with human mortality. Greece Dying on the Ruins of Missolonghi (1827; Musée des Beaux-Arts, Bordeaux), for example, commemorated the defeat of the Greek nationalists gathered there around Lord Byron in the early 1820s. Delacroix saw in the Greek struggle for independence against the Turks an affirmation of the ideal of liberty. In the painting, Greece is personified as a young woman with supplicating gesture. The blood-spattered ruins on which she stands indicate defeat, and the greenish tint on the woman's breast, suggesting imminent death, symbolizes the defeat of a noble cause.
The painting in many respects prefigures Liberty Leading the People (1830), in which the heroine is now the triumphant figure of liberty.

In 1832, Delacroix accompanied a French embassy to the sultan of Morocco. While at Tangiers he filled notebooks with drawings of local details, amassing facts for the paintings with Oriental subjects he would introduce into French art. Yet his Oriental pictures are never mere descriptions of local customs, for Delacroix always insisted that imagination was the essential gift of the painter. In Lion Hunt (1861; Art Institute of Chicago), a Rubenesque picture filled with men, horses, and wild animals, such details as turbans and wild, non-European expressions are fused by the unreal color into an imaginative vision.

Literature was another powerful stimulus to Delacroix's imagination. The theme of Hamlet especially appealed to him because Shakespeare's hero was also tortured by the uncertainty of existence. In Hamlet and Horatio in the Graveyard (1859; Louvre, Paris) the figures appear amid reminders of human death. The ground slopes away under a sky filled with blood-red clouds. Painted with tenuous brushstrokes, the figures' surroundings seem to share their restlessness, and a fantasylike atmosphere pervades the scene.

Delacroix's career was studded with honors. He was awarded (1831) the medal of the Legion of Honor and was commissioned to decorate the Library of the Senate in the Luxembourg Palace and the Library of the Chamber of Deputies in the Bourbon Palace (both completed 1847). He was elected to the Institut de France in 1857.