Death of Sardanapalus

A king reclines on a blood-red bed and watches, unmoved, as everything he owns is destroyed around him. Delacroix's huge canvas shocked the Salon of 1827 and still overwhelms the eye.

The story behind the painting

Eugene Delacroix painted The Death of Sardanapalus in 1827. Its subject is Sardanapalus, a king of Assyria whose story comes from the Greek historian Diodorus Siculus. Facing defeat, the king chooses to destroy all his possessions, his people and his luxuries, in a funeral pyre of excess. Delacroix was inspired by Lord Byron's play Sardanapalus of 1821. The original, about 392 by 496 cm according to Wikidata, is in the Louvre in Paris, and a smaller replica Delacroix made in 1844 is in the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

What to look for

The eye goes first to the large bed draped in rich red fabric. On it lies the king in flowing white with sumptuous gold at his neck and head, gazing with a disinterested eye over the chaos. A woman lies dead across the lower half of the bed. Six women in various states of undress are being killed by half a dozen men; one man dies by his own sword, another in the left foreground tries to kill a richly adorned horse. Golden elephant heads decorate the bed and treasures lie amid the carnage. Only one woman, reclining by an elephant head, looks out at us.

Meaning and intent

Delacroix used broad, painterly brushstrokes and rich, warm colours that give the scene a strong sense of movement. The red of the bed burns against the dark background, while the white robe, the creamy limbs of the women and flashes of gold pull the eye quickly around the picture. Foreshortening tilts the death scene toward the viewer. It is the opposite of Neoclassical order, with its subdued colour, rigid space and moral subject: Sardanapalus is no classical hero like David's Horatii. Linda Nochlin argued that contemporaries read the work as a destructive sexual fantasy of Delacroix's own.

Legacy

At the Paris Salon of 1827 the painting was controversial and polarising; one critic called it the fanaticism of ugliness. Yet it became a landmark of Romanticism and inspired music. Hector Berlioz wrote a cantata, Sardanapale, in 1830. Franz Liszt began an Italian opera, Sardanapalo, telling Princess Cristina Belgiojoso that his finale would aim to set the entire audience alight; he finished only Act 1 in 1852, and it was premiered in 2018. The poet Paul Claudel returned to the painting in 1946, writing that neither the painter nor his model could make anything but a mess of earth's most beautiful things.