Dernières Paroles de l’empereur Marc Aurèle

A dying emperor grips his son's arm and hands him to the wise men around his bed, while the young man in red only wants to slip away. Delacroix, ill himself, painted the end of a virtuous age, and never quite made peace with the picture.

The story behind the painting

Delacroix thought of painting the death of Marcus Aurelius as early as 1824 but only took it up in the 1840s. He began the canvas in 1843, and his student and collaborator Louis de Planet laid in the underlying sketch and first glazes following his instructions. Delacroix resumed in January 1844 and finished in the autumn. He was ill while making this and other works shown in 1845, which added to the sombre mood. The picture was first exhibited at the Paris Salon of 1845. Several versions exist; the one in Lyon, about 348 by 260 cm according to Wikidata, is the largest, and the museum also keeps a preliminary sketch.

What to look for

Théophile Gautier described the scene at the Salon: on his deathbed the emperor commends his son Commodus to stoic philosophers, grave men with unkempt hair, frowning faces and long white or grey beards, who cast anxious looks at the young man. Commodus listens, but he would already have escaped if his father were not holding his arm. Look at the contrast: the grey, austere sages and the youthful Commodus in a red robe, painted in a feminised way, the red suggesting dangerous sensuality. In a smaller easel version his face is softer. The strong chiaroscuro links the work to Caravaggesque models and to Poussin.

Meaning and intent

The painting belongs to Delacroix's long interest in the end of civilisations, like Greece on the Ruins of Missolonghi and The Death of Sardanapalus. A wise and measured ruler hands his empire to an unruly son, and virtue lies on its deathbed as impulse takes over. Delacroix rejected the post-Revolution belief in endless progress; he wrote in his journal that progress leads in the end to its own negation. He admired Marcus Aurelius' Meditations and stoic philosophy, which deepens the tragedy, and saw the work as a comment on a France sliding into materialism and commercialism.

Legacy

Delacroix's feelings about the picture were complicated. He wrote of his disdain for it, felt better only after comparing it with a figure by Dubufe, and urged the state to buy his Sultan of Morocco instead, though he still called Marcus Aurelius one of his two important works at the 1845 Salon. Critics were warmer. Gautier praised colour that could make the Flemings and Venetians envious, and Charles Baudelaire called it splendid, sublime and misunderstood. Another critic compared its composition to David's Death of Socrates. The best-known version is now in the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon.