Eugène Delacroix

1798-1863

Eugène Delacroix, leader of French Romanticism, chose colour and movement over the clean line, and gave the world Liberty Leading the People. Baudelaire said he was passionately in love with passion, yet coldly determined to express it as clearly as possible.

Origins

Delacroix was born on 26 April 1798 at Charenton-Saint-Maurice near Paris. His mother, Victoire Oeben, was the daughter of the cabinetmaker Jean-François Oeben, and he had three much older siblings: Charles-Henri, who became a general in Napoleon's army, Henriette, who married a diplomat, and Henri, killed at the Battle of Friedland in 1807. The source notes medical reasons to doubt that his legal father, Charles-François Delacroix, could have fathered him, and says the statesman Talleyrand, whom the adult Eugène resembled, considered himself the real father and later helped him with anonymous commissions. Charles Delacroix died in 1805 and his mother in 1814, leaving Eugène an orphan at sixteen. He studied at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand and in Rouen, steeping himself in the classics and winning drawing prizes, and in 1815 began training with Pierre-Narcisse Guérin in the neoclassical manner of David.

Life and turning points

Moved by Géricault's The Raft of the Medusa, Delacroix painted The Barque of Dante, accepted at the Salon of 1822. It caused a sensation and was widely derided, yet the State bought it, a pattern of fierce opposition and enlightened support that followed him all his life. Two years later The Massacre at Chios brought popular success. In 1825 he visited England, meeting Thomas Lawrence and Richard Parkes Bonington. Liberty Leading the People followed in 1830; the government bought it, but by 1832 officials found it too inflammatory and removed it from view, though he kept receiving commissions for murals and ceilings. That same year he travelled to Spain and North Africa with a diplomatic mission to Morocco, a journey that fed his painting for the rest of his life. He also painted hundreds of religious works, including the Saints-Anges chapel in Saint-Sulpice. He died on 13 August 1863.

Style and technique

Against the neoclassical perfection of his rival Ingres, Delacroix looked to Rubens and the Venetian Renaissance, putting colour and movement before clean outline and carefully modelled form. Seeing paintings by John Constable and watercolours by Bonington led him to repaint the sky and distant landscape of The Massacre at Chios with free, open strokes. His themes were dramatic: violence and sensuality in The Combat of the Giaour and Hassan, a whole storm of colour and tragedy in The Death of Sardanapalus. A critic said in 1855 that The Murder of the Bishop of Liège was left at the supreme moment when one more stroke would have ruined everything. Yet he avoided sentimentality and bombast; his Romanticism was that of an individualist. He was also a fine lithographer, illustrating Shakespeare, Walter Scott and Goethe's Faust, and drew his literary subjects from Byron, whom he greatly admired.

Stories and anecdotes

The Massacre at Chios showed no heroes raising their swords, only disaster, and the painter Antoine-Jean Gros called it a massacre of art; the infant clutching its dead mother struck viewers with special force. Delacroix painted Greece Expiring on the Ruins of Missolonghi partly because Byron, his hero, had died there. In North Africa he went less to study art than to escape Parisian civilisation, and he wrote that the Greeks and Romans were at his door, in the Arabs wrapped in white blankets who looked like Cato or Brutus. He managed to sketch some women secretly in Algiers for Women of Algiers in their Apartment. The boy waving a pistol in Liberty Leading the People is sometimes thought to have inspired Gavroche in Victor Hugo's Les Misérables. His Pietà was later painted again by Vincent van Gogh.

Legacy

Delacroix is regarded as the leader of the French Romantic school and, together with Ingres, as one of the last old masters of painting; he is also one of the few of them ever photographed. His expressive brushwork and his study of the optical effects of colour profoundly shaped the Impressionists, while his passion for the exotic inspired the Symbolists. His journey to North Africa produced more than a hundred paintings and drawings and added a new, personal chapter to Orientalism, with animals such as horses and lions embodying romantic passion until the end of his life. Liberty Leading the People, finally displayed after the Revolution of 1848, hangs in the Louvre, where Parisians under the tricolour still march forward behind the luminous figure of Liberty, rising out of the smoke above the fallen.

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Wikipedia

Romanticismo · academicismo · pintura romántica

Artistas relacionados

Francisco Goya · Caspar David Friedrich · J. M. W. Turner

Obras de Eugène Delacroix