Eugène delacroix pronunciation

DELACROIX, EUGÈNE (1798–1863), French painter.

Ferdinand-Eugène-Victor Delacroix was a leader of the Romantic movement in the visual arts and, by the second half of the nineteenth century, its quintessential embodiment. Despite his reputation as an iconoclastic modern artist, Delacroix grew increasingly disillusioned with modernity and saw himself as a continuator of the great tradition of history painting begun in the Renaissance. In his later life he was widely perceived as an opponent of tradition and classicism, and an antagonist to Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, but in fact he was the last great monumental French painter working in the grand manner.

Delacroix was the son of Charles Delacroix, a government administrator, and Victoire Oeben, the daughter of a successful cabinetmaker. It was rumored that his biological father was the prominent statesman Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand, whom Delacroix strongly resembled. Delacroix distinguished himself as a student at the prominent Lycée imperial (now Louis le Grand) before entering the studio of Pierre-Narcisse Guérin to train as a painter. There he was particularly influenced by Théodore Géricault. While still a student he produced a number of prints that reveal his early attraction to Liberal politics.

Delacroix was a great admirer of literature and exhibited a precocious taste for Romantic writers (Goethe, Byron, and Sir Walter Scott) and those literary figures of the past whom they admired (especially Shakespeare and Dante). His first submission to the Salon, the major biennial art exhibition in Paris, was Dante's Barque (1822), which combined these newly fashionable literary tastes with an eclectic mix of sources from classical sculpture, Michelangelo, Antoine-Jean Gros, and Géricault, and won the artist considerable acclaim when it was purchased by the government.

For the next two Salons, Delacroix submitted paintings treating the Greek War of Independence (1821–1832). The Greek cause was championed by Liberals and other parties opposed to the Restoration government of Charles X, who favored the Ottoman Turks in the struggle. While Delacroix's paintings protested the suffering of the Greeks at the hands of the Turks, they also revealed a morbid fascination with cruelty, rape, and miscegenation. In the 1820s he painted numerous pictures of violent subjects drawn from Romantic literature and France's medieval past. His penchant for images of gratuitous death and destruction found full expression in The Death of Sardanapalus (1827), which depicted the last Assyrian king immolating himself, his concubines, chattel, and riches on an enormous pyre, rather than let them pass to the conquering Medes. The painting's dynamic composition, rich palette of reds and gold, and painterly bravura, combined with the outrageous subject, placed Delacroix at the center of the Romantic rebellion against official art.

The Revolution of 1830 renewed Delacroix's overt engagement with domestic politics and inspired his most famous work, Liberty Guiding the People (1830). Delacroix pictured the violent insurrection that brought down Charles X through the image of a group of revolutionaries rushing across a barricade near the Pont d'Arcole in Paris. The revolutionaries, who rise up so heroically under-neath the tricolor flag, include workers and street urchins, but also a bourgeois and members of both sexes, suggesting broad support for the July Revolution. In approaching the work, Delacroix was torn between, on the one hand, the high moral purpose and universality conveyed through classical nude figures and, on the other, the drama and specificity of a realistic portrayal of contemporary events. The central woman ingeniously combines idealized, allegorical elements (nudity and Phrygian cap) with the unidealized dress of a working-class woman. Her profiled head and raised arm have the flatness and simplicity of an emblem, while the sculptural form of the rest of her body joins her to the real world of historical events. The painting was well received, and the new government purchased the picture and awarded Delacroix the Legion of Honor.

In 1832 Delacroix traveled with a diplomatic mission to convince the sultan of Morocco to acquiesce to the French occupation of Algeria. The voyage was a revelation to the artist. In a variation of the myth of the noble savage, he claimed to have found a living antiquity in contemporary North African society, every bit as beautiful as classical Greece or Rome and far more inspiring for his artistic pursuits than the traditional trip to Italy. He filled seven sketchbooks with brilliant drawings and watercolors recording his experience. Throughout the rest of his career he created paintings from his sketches, notes, and remembrances. These mix ethnographic observation and orientalist fantasy in complex ways, though toward the end of his life they increasingly provided an escape from modern society into the more elemental world he believed North Africa to be.

Throughout his visit to North Africa, Delacroix tried to gain entrance into a harem, a prime locus of fantasy for European men. Only on his return voyage, during a brief visit to Algiers, was he able to do so, though some scholars doubt a visit to a harem ever took place. Upon returning to France, he completed his Women of Algiers in Their Apartment (1834), in which three women sit indolently around a hookah while their servant draws back a curtain. Nineteenth-century viewers reveled in the purported accuracy of the picture, which allowed them to penetrate the space of the harem. The true brilliance of the picture lies in the rich colors, sensuous brushwork, and lambent atmosphere, all of which answered to the European desires surrounding the subject.

During the latter half of his career Delacroix continued to pursue literary and historical subjects associated with Romanticism, and many of his major works evince a continuing fascination with troubled heroes and the barbaric underside of civilization. At the same time, he became increasingly concerned to emulate the grand manner and traditional subject matter of such past masters as Rubens and Veronese. He received major commissions from the July Monarchy for mural decorations for the Salon of the King (1833) and the library of the Chamber of Deputies (begun 1838) in the Bourbon Palace (now the National Assembly), and the library of the Senate in Luxembourg Palace (1840). Other major monumental commissions include the Chapel of Holy Angels in St. Sulpice (1949), the ceiling of the Gallery of Apollo in the Louvre (1850), and the Salon of Peace in the Hôtel de Ville (1851).

Delacroix's literary output was considerable. As a young man he considered a career as a writer and completed an unpublished play and novella. During the course of his career he published important essays on Michelangelo, Raphael, Nicolas Poussin, Antoine-Jean Gros, and Pierre-Paul Prud'hon. He kept a private journal, remarkable for its candor and clarity of expression, from 1822 to 1824, and again from 1847 to the end of his life. His journal and letters were published posthumously and have become major sources for understanding nineteenth-century aesthetic thought.

Official recognition was slow to come to Delacroix. In 1855, at the Universal Exhibition in Paris, he was honored with a retrospective exhibition as one of the four most prominent living artists in France, but only in 1857, on his eighth attempt, was he admitted to the Academy of Fine Arts. His influence was enormous. Cézanne, the impressionists, and many of the postimpressionists, among others, found direct inspiration in his imaginative imagery, technical innovations, brilliant color, and lively brushwork. Today he is considered one of the greatest French painters of all time.

See alsoFrance; Géricault, Théodore; Painting; Revolutions of 1830; Romanticism.

bibliography

Primary Sources

Delacroix, Eugène. Correspondance générale d'Eugène Delacroix. 5 vols. Paris, 1936–1938.

——. Ecrits sur l'art. Paris, 1988.

——. Journal, 1822–1863. Paris, 1996. Originally published 1950.

Secondary Sources

Fraser, Elisabeth A. Delacroix, Art and Patrimony in Post-Revolutionary France. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 2004. Relates Delacroix's art from the Bourbon Restoration to politics, constructions of the family, and practices of collecting and art criticism.

Hannoosh, Michele. Painting and the Journal of Eugène Delacroix. Princeton, N.J., 1995.

Jobert, Barthélémy. Delacroix. Princeton, N.J., 1998. A comprehensive survey of Delacroix's career.

Johnson, Lee. The Paintings of Eugène Delacroix: A Critical Catalogue, 1816–1831. 6 vols. Oxford, U.K., 1981–1989. Catalogue raisonné with commentary.

Wright, Beth S., ed. The Cambridge Companion to Delacroix. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 2000. Collection of critical essays on various aspects of Delacroix's art and career.

David O'Brien