Eugène Delacroix

gigatos | January 14, 2022

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Summary

Eugène Delacroix is a French painter born on April 26, 1798 in Charenton-Saint-Maurice and died on August 13, 1863 in Paris.

In nineteenth-century French painting, he is considered the leading exponent of Romanticism, the vigor of which corresponds to the scope of his career. At the age of 40, his reputation was sufficiently established to allow him to receive important commissions from the state. He painted on canvas and decorated the walls and ceilings of public monuments. He also left engravings and lithographs, several articles written for magazines and a Journal published shortly after his death and republished several times. Noticed at the Salon in 1824, he produced in the following years works inspired by historical or literary anecdotes as well as contemporary events (Liberty guiding the people) or a trip to North Africa (Women of Algiers in their apartment).

Family

Eugène Delacroix, the fourth child of Victoire Œben (1758-1814) and Charles-François Delacroix (1741-1805), was born in 1798 at 2, rue de Paris in Charenton-Saint-Maurice, near Paris, in a large 17th- and 18th-century bourgeois house that still exists.

Charles-François Delacroix, a lawyer in Paris from 1774, became a deputy under the Convention. At the end of 1795, he became Minister of External Affairs, then Ambassador to the Batave Republic from November 6, 1797 to June 1798. Allied to the Empire, he was appointed prefect of the Bouches-du-Rhône in Marseille on March 2, 1800, then three years later, prefect of the Gironde in Bordeaux where he died on November 4, 1805 and where he rests, in the Chartreuse cemetery.

Victoire Œben, 17 years younger than her husband, was descended from a family of renowned cabinetmakers, the Œbens. When her father Jean-François Œben, the famous cabinetmaker to Louis XV, died in 1763, Victoire was five years old. Three years later, in 1766, her mother, Françoise Vandercruse, sister of the cabinetmaker Roger Vandercruse, remarried to the cabinetmaker Jean-Henri Riesener, a student of her first husband. From this second union was born on August 6, 1767 Henri-François Riesener, painter, half-brother of Victoire and uncle of Eugène Delacroix, who had a son from his union with Félicité Longrois, the painter Léon Riesener.

Charles-Henri Delacroix, the eldest child of Victoire and Charles-François Delacroix, was born on January 9, 1779. He had a successful career in the imperial armies. Promoted to honorary marshal of camp in 1815, he was demobilized with the rank of general (but with half pay).

Henriette was born on January 4, 1782 and died on April 6, 1827. On December 1, 1797 she married Raymond de Verninac-Saint-Maur (1762-1822), a diplomat in Sweden and then in Constantinople, and had a son, Charles de Verninac (1803-1834), a nephew of Eugène. At the request of her husband, David made her portrait (Paris, Louvre Museum), in 1799, in a genre that he developed during the last years of the Revolution, the seated model, cut at the knees, on a plain background. Her husband also asked the sculptor Joseph Chinard (1756-1813) for his bust of Diana the Huntress preparing her features (1808, Musée du Louvre).

Henri, born in 1784, was killed at the age of 23 on June 14, 1807 at the battle of Friedland.

Victoire Œben dies on September 3, 1814. The settlement of the maternal estate ruins the Delacroix family. This disaster swallows up all the children”s fortune; a property that the artist”s mother had bought to cover a debt must be sold at a loss. The Verninacs take in the young Eugene who has remained destitute.

Noting that the painter”s father had been suffering from a large testicular tumor for fourteen years and until a few months before Eugène”s birth, some authors have inferred that his progenitor would have been another man, Talleyrand, credited with numerous female liaisons, who replaced Charles-François Delacroix at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs on July 16, 1797. This opinion is vigorously contested.

The surgeon Ange-Bernard Imbert-Delonnes (1747-1818) published a pamphlet in December 1797 about the removal of this sarcocele on September 13, 1797, which was a medical first. He indicated that the operation was successful and that the patient was completely recovered after 60 days. Eugène Delacroix was born seven months after the operation. However, Charles Delacroix”s tumor was not necessarily an obstacle to procreation.

If there are reasons to think that Charles-François Delacroix could not have been his progenitor, the conjectures that make the artist a natural son of Talleyrand are unfounded. Caroline Jaubert evoked this rumor in 1880 in the description of a salon scene that would have taken place around 1840.

For Raymond Escholier “between the mask of the Prince of Benevento and that of Delacroix there is an astonishing resemblance : Delacroix”s features are not reminiscent of those of his brother the general, nor of those of his sister Henriette. There is a good chance that Eugène Delacroix was one of these sons of love, so often endowed with prestigious gifts”. However, many others note that Talleyrand was blond and pale, while, describing their friend Eugène Delacroix with jet hair, very black, Baudelaire speaks of a “complexion of Peruvian” and Théophile Gautier of an air of “maharajah”.

Emmanuel de Waresquiel reminds us of the absence of serious sources for this supposed paternity and concludes: “All those who have liked to force the line of their character, have allowed themselves to be tempted, without worrying about the rest, nor especially about the sources or rather the absence of sources. Once and for all, Talleyrand is not the father of Eugène Delacroix. One lends only to the rich.

Talleyrand was in any case close to the Delacroix family and one of the artist”s occult protectors. He is said to have facilitated the purchase by Baron Gérard of the Scène des massacres de Scio (Scene of the Massacres of Scio), presented at the Salon of 1824 and now in the Louvre Museum, for the sum of 6,000 francs. Talleyrand”s adulterous grandson, the Duc de Morny, president of the legislature and half-brother of Napoleon III, made Delacroix the official painter of the Second Empire, although the emperor preferred Winterhalter and Meissonnier. Delacroix also benefited from the tutelary shadow of Adolphe Thiers, who was his mentor. Thiers” support seems to have helped Delacroix obtain several important commissions, including the decoration of the Salon du Roi in the Palais Bourbon and part of the decoration of the Senate library in the Palais du Luxembourg.

However, this protection does not establish a natural paternity, and Maurice Sérullaz.

Beyond the interest of curiosity, the opinions in this controversy reflect the importance that commentators want to attribute, either to individual talent and character, or to social and family relationships, or even to heredity, in Delacroix”s success.

Education and training

When his father died, Eugene was only seven years old. Mother and son left Bordeaux for Paris. In January 1806, they lived at 50 rue de Grenelle, in the apartment of Henriette and Raymond de Verninac. From October 1806 to the summer of 1815, Delacroix attended an elite school, the Lycée Impérial (now the Lycée Louis-le-Grand) where he received a good education.

He read the classics: Horace, Virgil, but also Racine, Corneille and Voltaire. He learns Greek and Latin. The numerous drawings and sketches scribbled in his notebooks already attest to his artistic gifts. He met his first confidants at the Lycée Impérial: Jean-Baptiste Pierret (1795-1854), Louis (1790-1865) and Félix (1796-1842) Guillemardet, and Achille Piron (1798-1865). They shared his bohemian life and remained faithful to him until the end of his life.

He also received an early musical education, taking lessons from an old organist who loved Mozart. This music master, who noticed the child”s talents, recommended to his mother that he become a musician. But the death of his father in 1805 put an end to this possibility. However, throughout his life, he will continue to participate in the musical life of Paris, seeking the company of composers, singers and instrumentalists: Paganini playing the violin (1831, Philipps Collection of Washington).

In 1815, his uncle, Henri-François Riesener, sent him to the studio of Pierre-Narcisse Guérin, where his fellow students were Paul Huet, Léon Cogniet, Ary and Henry Scheffer, and Charles-Henri de Callande de Champmartin. There he met Théodore Géricault, seven years his senior, who had a major influence on his art. Guérin”s teaching was both classical and liberal. He taught the neo-classical principle of the primacy of drawing over color, the return to the Antique dear to the German Winckelmann, but was not closed to new ideas.

In March 1816, Delacroix continued his apprenticeship, still with Guérin, at the Beaux-Arts de Paris where the teaching was less expensive than in private studios. The teaching favors drawing and copying the masters. Thanks to the work card in the print cabinet of the National Library, which he acquired on July 13, 1816, he copied manuscripts from collections of medieval costumes for several years. His results in the competitions and examinations of the École des Beaux-Arts did not give him hope for a stay in Rome; in 1820, he failed the first part of the Prix de Rome. At the same time, he found small jobs: industrial drawing, apartment decoration, theater costumes; the small income from his inheritance was not enough to meet his needs.

Throughout his career, Delacroix suffered from the deficiencies of his technical training, which was underestimated in the official teaching. For him, David was the last holder of lost “secrets”. His generation, “disgusted with an icy painting, where the quality of the material held so little place, seems to have turned its back on all teachings”. Painting by instinct, the result, as for most of his contemporaries, was disasters that became apparent after a few years. The Death of Sardanapalus, from 1827, had to be completely restored by 1861. The delicate tonal relationships that had enchanted his contemporaries did not remain; cracks and crevices, due to the haste to paint without respecting the drying time, damaged his painting. Delacroix”s diary testifies to his awareness of his shortcomings.

In 1816, Delacroix met Charles-Raymond Soulier, an Anglophile amateur watercolorist and student of Copley Fielding who had returned from England. This friend and Richard Parkes Bonington familiarized Delacroix with the art of watercolor, which moves away from the academic standards taught at the Beaux-Arts. The British combined watercolor with gouache and used various processes such as gumming, varnishing and scraping. Soulier also taught him the rudiments of the English language.

From April 24 to the end of August 1825, he travels to England. He discovered Shakespeare”s theater by attending performances of Richard III, Henry IV, Othello, The Merchant of Venice and The Tempest, two years before an English company came to Paris. He also attended an adaptation of Goethe”s Faust. Delacroix will find subjects in the theater throughout his career: Hamlet and Horatio at the Cemetery (1835, Frankfurt) and Hamlet and the Two Gravediggers (1839, Musée du Louvre). These subjects will be mixed until his death with oriental, literary, historical or religious themes. From this trip, the technique of watercolor acquires an importance in his work. It will be of great help to him during his trip to North Africa, to be able to restore all the colors.

Also read, biographies – Theodor Mommsen

The beginnings of a career

In 1819, Delacroix first tackled decoration with the dining room of M. Lottin de Saint-Germain”s private mansion in the Ile de la Cité. He finished the door tops in the Pompeian style before March 1820. Of this ensemble, which has now disappeared, only the drawings and projects, characters, allegorical or mythological scenes remain, preserved in the Louvre Museum.

In 1821, the tragedian Talma commissioned him to decorate the dining room of the mansion he had built at 9, rue de la Tour-des-Dames, in Montmartre with four door tops depicting the four seasons in a Greco-Roman style inspired by the frescoes of Herculaneum, like those of M. Lottin. The Louvre has a number of preparatory drawings and designs, the rest being kept in a private collection in Paris.

His first easel paintings are two altarpieces inspired by Renaissance painters:

In 1822, Delacroix, eager to make a name for himself in painting and to find a way out of his financial difficulties, appeared for the first time at the Salon with Dante”s Boat or Dante and Virgil in the Underworld, which the State bought from him for 2,000 francs, instead of the 2,400 he had asked for. The reactions of the critics were lively, even virulent. “A real tartouillade”, wrote Étienne-Jean Delécluze, a student of Jacques-Louis David and defender of his Davidian school, in the Moniteur of May 18. However, Adolphe Thiers, then a young journalist, evoked “the future of a great painter” in a laudatory article in the Constitutionnel of May 11. As for Antoine-Jean Gros, who admired La Barque de Dante, he described the painter as “a chastened Rubens”.

Having defined his subject very late, in mid-January, Delacroix had to work in a hurry in order to be ready to exhibit at the Salon Officiel, from April 24. He used varnishes that caused the colors to dry more quickly, but compromised the conservation of his canvas. The underlying dark layers dried faster than the light layers on the surface, causing enormous cracks and chipping. In February 1860 he obtained permission to restore it himself.

The theme, taken from Canto VIII of Dante”s Inferno, was unprecedented at the time. Contemporaries, having only a superficial knowledge of Dante”s work, always illustrated the same episodes: the story of Ugolino (Inferno, canto XXXIII), Paolo and Francesca (Inferno, canto V), and Charon”s Boat (Inferno, canto III). The choice of the anecdote and of a format until then reserved for religious, mythological or historical subjects for this painting with a literary subject show the novelty of Delacroix, who wants to prove that he is a true painter, and that he masters the different parts of his art: the nude, the drapery, the expression.

For this painting, the influences are multiple. Critics point out similarities between Dante”s Boat and Géricault”s Raft of the Medusa (1819, Louvre), a close-up view, a boat, raging waves, in order to diminish their importance.

Théodore Géricault influenced Delacroix considerably, particularly at the beginning of his career. He borrowed his style: strong contrasts of light and shadow giving relief and modeling. He also uses some of his colors: vermilion, Prussian blue, browns, colored whites. The Turkish officer abducting the Greek slave on his horse in the Scene of the Massacres of Scio (1824, Musée du Louvre) was inspired by Géricault”s Officer of the Mounted Hunters (1812, Musée du Louvre). When Géricault died on January 26, 1824, Delacroix became the unwilling leader of Romanticism.

Michelangelo”s influence is apparent in the imposing musculature of the damned (reminiscent of one of the two Slaves in the Louvre) and of the woman, derived from a male prototype. The figure of Phlegias, the drowning man, in charge of leading Dante and Virgil to the infernal city of Dity, refers to Antiquity and to the Belvedere Torso (4th century B.C., Pio-Clementino Museum in Rome). The naiads in Rubens” Landing of Marie de Medici in Marseilles (1610, Louvre Museum) inspire the coloring of the drops of water on the bodies of the damned in small strokes of pure juxtaposed colors. Delacroix had produced a study: Torso of a Mermaid, after the Landing of Marie de Medici (Kunstmuseum Basel).

Under the influence of Géricault and with the encouragement of Gros, Delacroix multiplied his studies of horses from life in the 1820s. On April 15 of that year, he noted in his diary: “It is absolutely necessary to start making horses. Go to a stable every morning; go to bed very early and get up the same way”. He established a study program that included visits to the stables and the riding school. The constitution of this encyclopedia will be useful for his future paintings.

With Scène des massacres de Scio, which Delacroix presented in 1824 at the Salon Officiel, as with La Grèce sur les ruines de Missolonghi two years later, Delacroix participated in the philhellene movement. He was awarded a second class medal and the State bought it for 6,000 francs, which was then exhibited in the Musée du Luxembourg. The painting was inspired by a current event: the massacre of the population of the island of Chio by the Turks, which occurred in April 1822. From this date, Delacroix had the idea of painting a picture on this theme, which he abandoned in favor of The Boat of Dante. He found his subject in the book Mémoires du colonel Voutier sur la guerre actuelle des Grecs. On Monday, January 12, 1824, he lunched with the colonel and noted in his diary: “It is thus properly today .

For the elaboration of his painting, Delacroix carried out iconographic research at the National Library and obtained from M. Auguste the loan of oriental costumes brought back from his travels in the East. A notebook used around 1820-1825, mentions the consultation of Lettres sur la Grèce, by Claude-Étienne Savary as well as sketches made from the Mœurs et coutumes turques et orientales dessinés dans le pays, by the draughtsman Rosset (1790).

Mr. Auguste, a former sculptor who became a watercolorist and pastelist, brought back remarkable studies and a whole series of objects from his travels in Greece, Egypt, Asia Minor and Morocco: fabrics, costumes, weapons and various trinkets. He is considered the initiator of orientalism in France. His influence on Delacroix and his art is very strong, especially between 1824 and 1832, date of his trip to North Africa.

It begins the woman dragged by the horse on January 25. The model who posed for this character is called Émilie Robert.

Critics, most artists and the public received the painting harshly. Delacroix”s colleagues, such as Girodet, reproached him for his manner of painting, his negligence with regard to the drawing, as Delécluze had done in 1822. Gros had appreciated Dante”s Boat; he welcomed the Scene of the Massacres of Scio, declaring it to be the “Massacre of painting”. Some critics, pointing to the influence of Gros” Pestiférés de Jaffa, wrote that he had “badly washed Gros” palette”. Thiers, however, continued his unwavering support in Le Constitutionnel: “M. Delacroix has proved a great talent, and he has removed doubts by making the painting of the Greeks succeed that of Dante,” as Théophile Gautier and Charles Baudelaire who dedicated a poem to him one of his salons. This painting places him as the standard-bearer of the Romantics, which he deplores, not wanting to be affiliated with any school.

The painter also presented three other paintings at the Salon: Tête de vieille femme (Musée des Beaux-Arts d”Orléans) and Jeune orpheline au cimetière (Musée du Louvre), and outside the catalog, Le Tasse dans la maison des fous (private collection). Between 1823 and 1825, he painted several pictures of Greeks in palikar costume (Greek soldiers fighting the Turks during the War of Independence) and Turks, some of which may have been used for Scene of the Massacres of Scio. At the Salon Officiel, Delacroix had the opportunity to see paintings by John Constable that his dealer Arrowsmith was showing, including The Hay Cart (1821, National Gallery, London), which was awarded the gold medal. An anecdote says that after seeing this painting, he decided to redo the sky of the Scene of the Massacres of Scio, after asking permission from the Count of Forbin, director of the museums.

That year, Delacroix shared the studio of his friend Thales Fielding, 20 Rue Jacob, for some time. He had met the four Fielding brothers through his good friend Raymond Soulier, who had been raised in England and who gave him English lessons. It was with them that he was introduced to watercolor, an English specialty. The following year he went to England with Thales.

The maturity period

During his trip to England, from May to August 1825, Delacroix visited Hampstead and Westminster Abbey, from which he drew inspiration for The Assassination of the Bishop of Liege (1831, Musée du Louvre). He met Sir David Wilkie, a history, genre and portrait painter, as well as Thomas Lawrence, whom he saw in his studio. He greatly admired his style and his portraits, and was inspired by his portrait of David Lyon (ca. 1825, Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum) for the portrait of Baron de Schwiter (1826-1830, National Gallery, London).

In the 1820s Delacroix, seven years older than him, met Louis-Auguste Schwiter (1805-1889) for the first time at the home of his friend Jean-Baptiste Pierret. They were very close friends and both great admirers of the English portraitist. He also visited Dr. Samuel Rush Merrick (en), an antique dealer well known for his collection of arms and armor, whom he studied with Richard Parkes Bonington, whom he had met in London. The two men shared the same taste for the Middle Ages, hence the joint studies they made together: several sheets were successively attributed to each other.

From 1826, Delacroix frequented Victor Hugo and his cenacle. At first, a group was formed around Charles Nodier and Alexandre Soumet. This first cenacle met first in Nodier”s apartment on the rue de Provence and then at the Bibliothèque de l”Arsenal where he had been appointed librarian. Their common interest in the Middle Ages gave birth to the “troubadour style”: Ingres and Delacroix both produced small paintings in this style.

At the same time, and from 1823 onwards, Victor Hugo”s friends formed a sort of school around the poet. More and more numerous, this second group constitutes from 1828 and in 1829 the second cenacle: Hugo becoming the leader of the romantic movement to which the members of the first cenacle will rally. In 1830, the relationship between Delacroix and Hugo deteriorated; the poet reproached him for his lack of commitment to romanticism.

On May 24, the Ottomans took Missolonghi, a stronghold of Greek independence. On May 24, Lebrun hosted an exhibition in his gallery to raise funds to support the Greek cause. It was a question of alerting public opinion while the French government advocated neutrality. Delacroix first presented The Doge Marino Faliero (Wallace collection in London), Don Juan and An Officer Killed in the Mountains, which he replaced in June by The Fight of Giaour and Hassan and in August by Greece on the Ruins of Missolonghi (Musée des Beaux-Arts in Bordeaux). For this allegory of Greece, he was inspired by the ancient Victories and the Marian figure, with its blue coat and white tunic. This interpretation of the subject confuses the critics, except Victor Hugo.

At this time of his life, Delacroix had many love affairs with married women, Eugènie Dalton, Alberthe de Rubempré, Elisa Boulanger or Joséphine Forget, “Delacroix is in love over the ears” according to Mérimée. The painter stayed at the Château de Beffes, at the home of his friend General Coëtlosquet, where he decorated the bedroom of Madame Louise Pron, known as Sarah, with arabesque frescoes in the Pompeian style. There he painted the Still Life with Lobsters, the meaning of which, according to Michèle Hannoosh, is to be found in the anticlerical caricatures that the painter made on this occasion of his friend General Coëtlosquet as a Lobster (Breton) and as Omar (disguised as a Turk): “Abbé Casse, missionary, prếchanting in front of the Caliph Lobster”.

At the Salon of 1827-1828, Delacroix exhibited several works. The critics unanimously rejected The Death of Sardanapalus (Louvre Museum). On March 21, Étienne-Jean Delécluze stated in the Journal des débats that it was a mistake: “The eye cannot unravel the confusion of lines and colors … Sardanapale is a painter”s error”, he added that Delacroix should take courses in perspective, this art being to painting what spelling is to everyone. The next day, for La Gazette de France, it was the “worst painting of the Salon”. Le Quotidien questioned a “bizarre work” on April 24. For the critic Vitet “Eugène Delacroix has become the scandal stone of the exhibitions” and Charles Chauvin in the Moniteur universel, if he recognizes a frank and bold execution and the warm and lively color of Rubens, he does not understand “Where are we? On what ground is the scene sitting? Where does this slave pretend to ride this horse? The majority of the public finds this painting ridiculous. Let M. Delacroix remember that French taste is noble and pure and that he cultivates Racine rather than Shakespeare.”

However, Delacroix in no way wanted to shock his peers, but rather to convince them of his genius by his references to the art of the past, by the multiplicity of his sources of inspiration and by the choice of his theme in the ancient Orient.

The outburst that the presentation of the painting caused embarrassed his friends, who did not intervene to defend him. Victor Hugo did not publicly take his side, although he expressed his enthusiasm in a letter to Victor Pavis on April 3, 1828, writing: “Do not believe that Delacroix has failed. His Sardanapale is a magnificent thing and so gigantic that it escapes the small views”. The painter is also a victim of the good words of humorists, whom he does not appreciate, despite his taste for puns. This time the painting was not bought, and the Superintendent of Fine Arts, Sosthène de La Rochefoucauld (which he categorically refused. The violence of the attacks will precipitate his quarrel with the romantic movement. He wrote that he would be kept away from public commissions for five years, but this was not the case.

Ingres, a neo-classical painter, presented The Apotheosis of Homer at the Salon that year. He represents the classical painting, as Delacroix represents the romantic painting, and will be seen as the main rival of Delacroix, throughout his life. Through these two artists, two opposing conceptions of painting confront each other: disegno (drawing) and the effacement of the artist behind the subject, for the classics, and colorito (color) and the affirmation of expression and the individual touch, for the romantics. With The Apotheosis of Homer and The Death of Sardanapalus, the two artists affirmed their doctrines. The quarrel of the coloring which opposed poussinists and rubenists in the years 1670 is renewed in the XIXth century with new oppositions, in addition to that between the color and the line. Critics considered Delacroix to be the leader of the colorists until the 20th century.

After this failure, Delacroix kept his painting in his studio. In 1844, he decided to sell it; in 1845, an American collector, John Wilson, bought it for 6,000 francs. The painting was restored by Haro and presented to the public in 1861. It was finally acquired by the Louvre in 1921.

The Salon of 1827-1828 was, along with the Universal Exhibition of 1855, the most important event for Delacroix in terms of the number of paintings presented. In two shipments, he exhibited first of all :

Then it will be :

In 1828, Charles Motte, a publisher in the rue des Marais, published Faust, Goethe”s tragedy translated by Philipp Albert Stapfer, illustrated with a suite of 17 lithographs by Delacroix. In a letter from Weimar to his friend Johann Peter Eckermann, Goethe expresses his enthusiasm for the work and believes that Stapfer has done a good job of translating the scenes he had imagined.

After Charles X”s visit to Nancy, Delacroix was commissioned by the Minister of the Interior on August 28, 1828 to paint a picture that the king wanted to give to the city. Completed in 1831, The Death of Charles the Bold or The Bold, more commonly known as The Battle of Nancy (Musée des beaux-arts de Nancy) was not exhibited at the Salon until 1834. This was followed in December 1828 or January 1829 by the commission of two paintings for the Duchess of Berry, widow of the king”s youngest son: Quentin Durward and the Scarred Man (Musée des beaux-arts de Caen) and The Battle of Poitiers, also known as King John at the Battle of Poitiers (Musée du Louvre), completed in 1830.

At the request of the Duke Louis-Philippe d”Orléans, Delacroix painted a large painting (420 × 300 cm) for his historical gallery at the Palais-Royal, Richelieu Saying Mass (1828) or Le Cardinal de Richelieu dans sa chapelle au Palais-Royal, which was destroyed during the 1848 Revolution and of which all that remains is a lithograph by Ligny that appears in Jean Vatout”s History of the Palais Royal (1830?).

In January, he asked him again for another painting inspired by Walter Scott, The Assassination of the Bishop of Liège (Louvre Museum), presented first at the Royal Academy in 1830, then at the Salon of 1831 and finally at the Universal Exhibition of 1855 in Paris and the one in London in 1862. There is an anecdote about this painting, concerning a white tablecloth, the main point of this scene, which Delacroix had difficulty painting. While drawing one evening at his friend Frédéric Villot”s, the painter is said to have given himself an ultimatum, declaring: “Tomorrow I will attack this damned tablecloth which will be for me Austerlitz or Waterloo”. And it was Austerlitz. For the framework of the vault, he was inspired by sketches made at the Palace of Justice in Rouen and the old Westminster Hall that he had visited during his stay in London.

Delacroix wrote five articles of art criticism for the Revue de Paris, which Louis Véron had founded the year before. The first one, dedicated to Raphael, appeared in May and the second one, to Michelangelo, in July. He expressed his aesthetic convictions and his admiration for these two artists, who had a great influence on his work.

The Three Glorious, on July 27, 28 and 29, 1830, led to the fall of Charles X and brought Louis-Philippe to power. On September 30, the new government organized three competitions for the decoration of the session room of the new Chamber of Deputies, which was to be rebuilt in the Palais Bourbon. Delacroix entered the last two competitions. The subjects proposed are :

The jury composed of Guérin (1774-1833), Gros and Ingres gave the Mirabeau to Hesse, a pupil of Gros, and the Boissy d”Anglas to Vinchon, Prix de Rome 1814. Achille Ricourt, writer and journalist, founder of the magazine L”Artiste, will make this decision an injustice to the romantic cause. Louis Boulanger wrote: “My painter is Delacroix. All that lives, all that moves, twists and accelerates the movement of the blood in your arteries… It is the accent of nature seized in what it has of more unexpected, invaluable qualities, which alone reveal the great painter, but which unfortunately reveal him too often to a too small number “.

The magazine also published the long “Letter on the competitions” that Delacroix had addressed on March 1, 1831, in order to accentuate the controversy. It is a violent indictment of the competitions, opposing the mediocre, the Rubens, the Raphaels, the Hoffmanns, in a tone full of irony. The sketch he made for the second subject, Mirabeau in front of Dreux-Brézé, is now on display at the Eugène-Delacroix National Museum. The sketch for the third subject, Boissy d”Anglas leading the riot, is in the Musée des Beaux Arts in Bordeaux.

In 1831, Delacroix presented La Liberté guidant le peuple at the Salon, which had opened that year on April 14. The painting, listed as No. 511 in the Salon catalog, was titled Le 28 juillet ou La Liberté guidant le peuple, a title it would later retain. Delacroix painted this picture for two reasons. The first was his failure at the 1827 Salon. He wished to erase it and curry favor with the powers that be by creating a work of art representing the liberal ideas he shared with the new French king Louis-Philippe I. Indeed, Delacroix was not in favor of the establishment of a Republic, he wanted the French monarchy to be a moderate monarchy respecting the freedoms but also the right of people to self-determination. Moreover, during the revolution of the Three Glorious, Delacroix was enrolled in the collection guards of the Louvre museum. He could not participate in this revolution. In a letter dated October 28, 1830 addressed to his brother Charles Delacroix, he wrote “I have undertaken a modern subject, a barricade, and if I have not won for the fatherland, at least I will paint for it. This has put me in a good mood. In this letter, he thus indicates that he regrets not having participated in this glorious revolution and that he intends to glorify those who participated in this revolution. The term “fatherland” shows that for him the realization of this painting is a patriotic act and thus that his first objective is not so much to please the new king with whom he had previously maintained friendly ties but in fact to glorify those who allowed this revolution. He wants to glorify in this painting, the people, that is to say the popular classes who established barricades and who fought to put an end to the reign of the monarch Charles X who wanted to restore an absolute monarchy of divine right. The composition of his painting reveals in itself this desire to glorify the people. Indeed, all the characters except the allegorical female figure of freedom are from the working class, that is to say, the people. The presence of a child at his side also reveals that all the citizens had the courage to fight to overthrow Charles X. He thus makes this people appear as a great people whose ideals must arouse respect. The liberal ideals being also those of the king Louis Philippe Ier, this last one will buy this painting for 3 000 francs with an aim of exposing it to the Palace of Luxembourg.

His painting is presented there only a few months. Hippolyte Royer-Collard, director of the Beaux-Arts, had it put in the reserves, for fear that its subject would encourage riots. Edmond Cavé, his successor, allowed Delacroix to show it again in 1839. It was exhibited again in 1848; however, a few weeks later, the painter was invited to take it back. Thanks to Jeanron, director of the museums, and Frédéric Villot, curator at the Louvre, La Liberté guidant le peuple was transferred to the reserves of the Musée du Luxembourg. With the approval of Napoleon III, it was exhibited at the 1855 Universal Exhibition. The Louvre museum put it on permanent display in November 1874.

Its subject evokes the street battles that took place during the revolutionary days of July 27, 28 and 29, also known as “The Three Glorious”. A young woman with a bare chest, wearing a Phrygian cap and holding a tricolored flag is the allegory of Liberty. She marches armed, accompanied by a street child brandishing pistols. To the left of the painting, a young man in a frock coat and top hat is holding an espingole (a blunderbuss rifle with two parallel barrels). Legend has it that this young man represents Delacroix and that he participated in the insurrection. Several elements make it possible to doubt it, like the not very reliable testimony of Alexandre Dumas. The painter, of Bonapartist opinions, would at most have been enrolled in the National Guard, restored on July 30, 1830 after having been abolished in 1827, in order to guard the treasure of the Crown, already in the Louvre.

Lee Johnson, a British scholar of Delacroix, identifies the young man instead as Étienne Arago, an ardent republican and director of the Vaudeville theater from 1830 to 1840. This was also the opinion of Jules Claregie in 1880. As for the street child, he would have inspired Victor Hugo (1802-1885) for his character of Gavroche, in Les Misérables, published in 1862.

The critics welcome the painting with moderation. Delécluze wrote in the Journal des Débats of May 7: “This painting painted with verve, colored in several of its parts with a rare talent, reminds completely the manner of Jouvenet”. Other critics found the figure of Liberty unacceptable, calling her “a drunkard, a public girl, a faubourian”. Her realism is disturbing: the nakedness of her torso, the hairiness of her armpits.

Its absence from the museum for many years makes it a Republican icon. The sculptor François Rude was inspired by it for his Departure of the Volunteers on the Arc de Triomphe de l”Étoile. In 1924, the painter, Maurice Denis, will take up this subject to decorate the dome of the Petit Palais. It was used as a poster for the reopening of the Louvre Museum in 1945 and then adorned the old 100 franc bill.

The quarrels between the classics and the romantics or moderns annoyed Delacroix. On June 27, 1831, he wrote to the painter Henri Decaisne (1799-1852), a member like himself of the Société libre de peinture et de sculpture, founded on October 18, 1830, in order to adopt a common strategy in the face of the powerful influence of the Société des Amis des Arts, close to the Institut de France (created in 1789 and revived in 1817). On Decaisne”s advice, he contacted Auguste Jal, an important art critic, to defend their cause in Le Constitutionnel. In a long letter that he addressed to M. d”Agoult, Minister of the Interior, in order to expose their grievances, he pointed out the dangers of separating the “official” artists from the others, whose talent was often greater. The official recognition is manifested in September 1831 by the granting of the Legion of honor.

In 1831, Eugène Delacroix accompanied for seven months the diplomatic mission that Louis-Philippe had entrusted to Charles-Edgar, Count of Mornay (1803-1878) to the Sultan of Morocco-1859). Mornay had to bring a message of peace and reassure the Sultan and the British, who were worried after the conquest of Algeria by France.

This trip was to leave a deep impression on the painter. Delacroix discovered Spanish Andalusia and North Africa, Morocco and Algeria: their landscapes, their architecture, their Muslim and Jewish populations, their customs, their lifestyle and costumes. The painter notes tirelessly, makes drawings and watercolors, which constitute one of the first travel books where he describes what he discovers. This trip was essential for his technique and aesthetics. He brought back seven notebooks that constitute his travel journal, of which only four have been preserved.

Thereafter, throughout his life, he would return regularly to the Moroccan theme in more than eighty paintings on “oriental” themes, notably Les Femmes d”Alger dans leur appartement (1834, Musée du Louvre), La Noce juive au Maroc (1841, Musée du Louvre), Le Sultan du Maroc (1845, Musée des Augustins de Toulouse).

This trip, which he undertook at his own expense, allowed Delacroix, who had never been to Italy, to rediscover “living antiquity”. The letter he sent to Jean-Baptiste Pierret on January 29 is very eloquent on this subject: “Imagine, my friend, what it is like to see consular figures, Cato and Brutus, lying in the sun, walking in the streets, mending their slippers, not even lacking the disdainful air that the masters of the world must have had…

Thanks to this trip to North Africa and his stay in Algeria from Monday 18 to Thursday 28 June 1832, Delacroix would have visited the harem of a former reis of the Dey, which he evoked in his painting of the women of Algiers in their apartment, from the Salon of 1834. (Louvre, cat. no. 163) a scene that he reproduced from memory in his studio upon his return. Poirel, an engineer at the port of Algiers, introduced him to a former privateer who agreed to open the doors of his house to the young Frenchman. Delacroix is transported by what he sees: “It is as in the time of Homer, the woman in the gynecae, embroidering wonderful fabrics. It is the woman as I understand her”.

Thanks to this trip, he was one of the first artists to go and paint the “Orient” from life, which resulted, in addition to numerous sketches and watercolors, in some beautiful paintings in the vein of the Women of Algiers in their apartment, a painting that is both orientalist and romantic, orientalism being characteristic of artists and writers in the 19th century.

On August 31, 1833, Thiers, Minister of Public Works at the time, entrusted Delacroix with his first major decoration: the “painting on the wall” of the King”s salon or Throne room, in the Bourbon Palace (now the National Assembly). This ensemble, composed of a ceiling, with a central canopy surrounded by eight caissons (four large and four small), four friezes located above the doors and windows, and eight pilasters, was paid 35,000 francs. He painted it in oil on marouflaged canvas, and the friezes in oil and wax directly on the wall in order to obtain a mattness closer to tempera. He adopted the same technique for the pilasters painted on the walls, but in grisaille. He completed this commission without collaborators, except for the ornamentalists for the gilded decorations, in particular Charles Cicéri.

In the four main caissons, he represented four allegorical figures symbolizing for him the living forces of the State: Justice, Agriculture, Industry and Commerce, and War. The four smaller ones, placed in the four corners of the room, between the main caissons, are covered with children”s figures, with attributes, such as :

In the elongated overmantels, separating the windows and doors, he represented in grisaille the main rivers of France (the Loire, the Rhine, the Seine, the Rhône, the Garonne and the Saône). He placed the ocean and the Mediterranean, the natural setting of the country, on both sides of the throne. His work was well received by the critics, who, on the whole, recognized him as a great decorator, on a par with Primaticcio or Medardo Rosso. For them, Delacroix knew how to combine intelligence and culture, by choosing themes adapted to the space and volume of the place to decorate. The Throne Room (today called the Delacroix Room), where the king went to inaugurate the parliamentary sessions, was indeed a thankless room to decorate, with a square format, about 11 meters on each side, and that he had to arrange.

The last years

In 1838, he presented the painting Medea at the Salon, which was bought by the State and attributed to the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Lille. In 1839, Delacroix went to Flanders to see Rubens” paintings with Elisa Boulanger, with whom he had formed a romance and whom he had known since a ball at Alexandre Dumas” house in 1833. In 1840, he presented the Entry of the Crusaders into Constantinople, now in the Louvre.

No sooner had his work been completed in the Salon du Roi, than in September 1838 the Minister of the Interior, Camille de Montalivet, entrusted him with the decoration of the library of the National Assembly, still in the Palais Bourbon. For this large-scale project, Delacroix painted the five domes and the two cul-de-fours of the reading room.

Each of the five domes is dedicated to a discipline, evoked in the pendants by scenes or events that illustrated it: Legislation in the center, Theology and Poetry on one side, Philosophy and Sciences on the other.

The two culs-de-four that frame them represent Peace, the cradle of knowledge, and War, which is its destruction:

This work lasted until the end of 1847, the construction having been delayed by various health problems and other parallel works. The work was enthusiastically received by the critics, and contributed to his recognition as a complete artist, in the tradition of the Italian Renaissance.

He was also solicited at the same time for the decoration of the reading room of the Senate library in the Luxembourg Palace in Paris, between 1840 and 1846:

In order to carry out these large orders, Delacroix opened a workshop in 1841 with students, assistants who had to adopt the painter”s handwriting in total abnegation. They were in charge of the realization of the backgrounds and the grisailles as Lasalle-Borde and Louis de Planet tell us.

In 1850, Delacroix was commissioned to paint the central decor of the Galerie d”Apollon in the Louvre, where he presented Apollo conquering the serpent Python. In 1851 the city of Paris commissioned him to decorate the Salon de la Paix in the Hôtel de Ville, which was destroyed by fire in 1871.

Champrosay

From 1844, Delacroix rented a “shanty” or cottage in Draveil, in a place called Champrosay, where he had a 10 m2 studio installed. In the middle of the countryside, accessible by train, Delacroix came to rest away from Paris, where cholera was raging. There he could, accompanied by his housekeeper Jenny, who had joined his service around 1835, take long walks in the countryside to cure his tuberculosis. He bought the house in 1858 and painted many landscapes and several views of Champrosay in pastel (Louvre Museum) and in oil (Le Havre Museum). He produced many paintings from memory following his notes and notebooks from Morocco, interpreting ancient scenes in the oriental style. His work became more intimate, the small paintings were sold by Parisian dealers. He regularly visited the Normandy coast in Étretat, Fécamp but especially Dieppe where he painted watercolors and pastels. He also painted still lifes, often imaginary flowers, such as yellow lilies with five petals. His relationship with George Sand, although close, became more distant. After having painted a portrait of the writer in 1834, Delacroix came regularly to Nohant-Vic where he painted an Education of the Virgin for the church of Nohant. He offered a bouquet of flowers in a vase above her bed, but when she fell in love with the engraver and student of Delacroix, Alexandre Manceau, Delacroix took umbrage especially since he was opposed to the revolution of 1848 which Sand was one of the figures.In 1844, the prefect Rambuteau commissioned a Pietà for the church of St. Denis of the Blessed Sacrament in Paris. He realized in 17 days his masterpiece which leaves “a deep groove of melancholy” according to the word of Baudelaire.

From the 1850s, Delacroix became interested in photography. In 1851, he was a founding member of the Heliographic Society. He practiced cliché-glass and in 1854, commissioned the photographer Eugene Durieu to take a series of photographs of male and female nude models. Delacroix imposes particular criteria for the taking of these photographs in view of their reuse, in particular images that are voluntarily a little blurred as well as the most total stripping. Fascinated by human anatomy Delacroix wrote in his diary “I look with passion and without fatigue these photographs of naked men, this admirable poem, this human body on which I learn to read and whose sight tells me more than the inventions of writers.

These photographs, commissioned by Delacroix from Durieu, as well as almost all the drawings made from them, have been exhibited at the Musée national Eugène-Delacroix with the assistance of the Bibliothèque nationale de France. The reunion of these photographs and the drawings they inspired appears fundamental to understanding the tension of the use of the photographic medium in Delacroix”s work, halfway between the exaltation of the discovery of a precious tool and the skepticism of the painter who only perceives in it an element of instrumental value, far from being able to compete with painting.

As long as the demand from collectors remains low, his career depends on official commissions. In order to gain the favor of the authorities, he frequented all the fashionable political circles and never refused a visit that might prove fruitful. Throughout his life, with the exception of his last years marked by illness, Delacroix had an intense social life but suffered from it, complying with these obligations in order to obtain commissions. He also regularly practiced thermal cures in Bad-Ems in 1861 or in Eaux-Bonnes in 1845, where he made a travel diary. He liked to retire to his country house in Champrosay, near the Sénart forest, especially from the 1840s.

In 1851, he was elected city councilor of Paris. He kept this position until 1861. He approved the method of learning drawing “to learn to draw correctly and from memory” of Madame Marie-Elisabeth Cavé.

Delacroix found support from the press, art magazines and certain critics of the time.

Thus Baudelaire considers that the painter is not only “excellent draughtsman, prodigious colorist, ardent and fertile composer, all that is obvious”, but that it “expresses especially the intimate of the brain, the astonishing aspect of the things.” A painting of Delacroix “is the infinite in the finite.” He is “the most suggestive of all painters” by translating “with color what one might call the atmosphere of human drama.”

Adolphe Thiers wrote several laudatory articles in the Constitutionnel, notably during the exhibition of the Massacres of Scio.

Théophile Gautier did not hesitate to criticize certain paintings, but over the years his admiration never wavered. “M. Delacroix understands perfectly the scope of his art, for he is a poet as well as a man of execution. He does not make painting return to the gothic puerilities nor to the pseudo-Greek drivel. His style is modern and responds to that of Victor Hugo in Les Orientales: it is the same ardor and the same temperament.”

Victor Hugo is much less convinced. He once said, as reported by his son Charles: Delacroix “has all minus one; he lacks what supreme artists, painters or poets, have always sought and found – beauty.” He added that in all of his work, one could not find a single truly beautiful woman, with the exception of the angels that Hugo saw as feminine in Christ in the Garden of Olives and a female bust (without specifying which one) from the Scenes of the Massacres of Scio. According to him, Delacroix”s female characters are characterized by what he describes, in a daring oxymoron, as “exquisite ugliness”, as illustrated in particular by the Women of Algiers in their Apartment.

Alexandre Dumas joins Hugo when he writes about the painter: “he sees rather ugly than beautiful, but his ugliness is always poetized by a deep feeling.” He sees in him “a painter in the full force of the term full of defects impossible to defend, full of qualities impossible to dispute.” Hence the virulence of irreconcilable opinions about him because, he adds, “Delacroix was a fact of war and a case of war.” should have only blind fanatics or bitter detractors.

His genius was only belatedly recognized by official painting circles. He would not triumph until 1855 at the Universal Exhibition. On this occasion, Ingres exhibited forty paintings, Delacroix thirty-five, a sort of retrospective including some of his greatest masterpieces loaned by various museums. He was presented as the man who knew how to go beyond classical training to renew painting. On November 14, 1855, he was made Commander of the Legion of Honor and received the Grand Medal of Honor at the Universal Exhibition. He was not elected to the Institut de France until January 10, 1857, after seven unsuccessful candidates, Ingres being opposed to his election. He was not entirely satisfied, as the Academy did not give him the position of professor of Fine Arts that he had hoped for. He then embarked on a Dictionary of Fine Arts which he did not complete.

However, the critics are still as severe with him, so Maxime Du Camp, wrote in his review of the Universal Exhibition: “M. Decamps is a wise democrat, revolutionary with conviction, who, by making a large part of the present, shows us in the future consoling and fortifying splendors. M. Eugène Delacroix is a demagogue without goal and without cause who loves the color for the color, that is to say the noise the noise. We respectfully admire M.Ingres; we believe M.Decamps, who has all our sympathies; we do not like M.Delacroix.” In 1859, he participated in his last Salon. He exhibited in particular The Ascent to Calvary, The Abduction of Rebekah and Hamlet. The Salon is the Waterloo of the painter according to Philippe Burty. In defense of the painter, Baudelaire wrote an apologetic article for the Revue française, “Salon de 1859” which ended with his words: “Excellent draughtsman, prodigious colorist, ardent and fertile composer, all this is obvious, all this has been said. But why does he produce the sensation of novelty? What does he give us more than the past? As great as the great ones, as skilful as the skilful ones, why does he please us more? One could say that, gifted with a richer imagination, he expresses especially the intimate of the brain, the astonishing aspect of the things, so much his work keeps faithfully the mark and the mood of his conception. It is the infinite in the finite. It is the dream! and I do not mean by this word the capharnaums of the night, but the vision produced by an intense meditation, or, in the less fertile brains, by an artificial stimulant. In a word, Eugene Delacroix paints especially the soul in its beautiful hours”. Delacroix answers to the poet by a letter remained famous: “How to thank you worthily for this new proof of your friendship? You treat me as one treats only the great dead; you make me blush while pleasing me a lot; we are made like that.

Delacroix was commissioned to paint three frescoes for the Chapel of the Angels in the church of Saint-Sulpice in Paris in 1849, a work that he carried out until 1861. These frescoes The Fight of Jacob and the Angel and Heliodorus driven from the temple accompanied by the lantern of the ceiling Saint Michael slaying the Dragon are the spiritual testament of the painter. To realize them, the painter moved to rue Furstenberg, just a few steps away. He developed a process based on wax and oil paint to paint his frescoes in a church with endemic humidity that causes the destruction of frescoes by saltpeter. Ill, he is exhausted by the work in the cold and difficult conditions. At the inauguration of the frescoes, no official will be present.

The fresco of the struggle of the angel and Jacob, illustrates the fight between the patriarch of the Bible and the angel in the center left of the fresco at the foot of three trees, and includes many allusions to his trip to Morocco in 1832, to the right turbaned characters are mentioned with sheep and a camel. On the right at the bottom of the fresco are Moroccan objects and on the grass at the foot of Jacob, the Moroccan sword Nimcha that he had brought back from his trip.

Completed in 1860, the fresco of Heliodorus chased from the temple, takes as its motif the moment when the Seleucid general, who had come to steal the Temple treasure, is chased away by horsemen angels according to the biblical account in the second Book of Maccabees (3, 24-27). Delacroix associates in the same vision the world of the East with the biblical world. He also draws his inspiration from the history of painting in the 1725 version of Francesco Solimena in the Louvre or that of Raphael.

The ceiling presents the victorious fight of Saint Michael against the dragon, three fights that echo Delacroix”s fight with painting: “Painting harasses and torments me in a thousand ways, like the most demanding mistress; for four months, I have fled from the early morning and run to this enchanting work, as to the feet of the most cherished mistress; what seemed to me from afar to be easy to overcome presents me with horrible and incessant difficulties. But whence comes that this eternal struggle, instead of bringing me down, lifts me up, instead of discouraging me, consoles me and fills my moments, when I have left it?”

In 1861, Baudelaire published a glowing article on the paintings of Saint-Sulpice, to which Delacroix responded with a warm letter to the poet. Baudelaire published in 1863 the work and life of Eugene Delacroix where he pays tribute to the genius of the painter.

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End of life

In 1862, he took up the theme of Medea.

But his last years were ruined by failing health, which plunged him into great loneliness. His friends accuse Jenny of having an emotional, jealous and exclusive, even self-interested feeling, reinforcing his distrust and his shady character.

He died “holding Jenny”s hand” at 7 o”clock in the evening of a hemoptysis attack as a result of tuberculosis on August 13, 1863, at 6 rue de Furstemberg in Paris, the apartment-studio where he had moved in 1857. He is buried in the Père-Lachaise cemetery, division 49. His tomb, a sarcophagus made of Volvic stone, is, according to his wish, copied from the antique since its shape faithfully reproduces the antique model of the tomb called Scipio. It was built by the architect Denis Darcy.

His friend, the painter Paul Huet, delivers his eulogy, which he opens with the words of Goethe: “Gentlemen. The dead go quickly”, which Delacroix liked to quote. Designated heir by Delacroix, he received the collection of lithographs of Charlet, paintings of Monsieur Auguste and sketches of Portelet, but not receiving any souvenir of Delacroix, drawing or paintings, he participated in the sale of the studio in 1864 where he bought among others a head of a horse, an academic figure.

Other contemporary artists paid him vibrant tributes, notably Gustave Courbet. In his Principes de l”art published in 1865, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon summarized: “leader of the romantic school, as David had been of the classical school, Eugène Delacroix is one of the greatest artists of the first half of the nineteenth century. He would have had no equals, and his name would have reached the highest degree of fame, if, to the passion of art and to the greatness of talent, he had joined the clearness of the idea “.

When he died, he left Jenny 50,000 francs, but also two watches, miniature portraits of her father and two brothers, and he even specified that she should choose from the furniture in the apartment to “make up the furniture for a small, decent apartment. She puts the diary notebooks “aside” from the executor of the will A. Piron and had them published. She died on November 13, 1869 on rue Mabillon in Paris, and was buried next to the painter, according to his wishes.

Eugène Delacroix had participated in the creation, in 1862, of the Société nationale des beaux-arts, letting his friend the writer Théophile Gautier, who had made him known in the Romantic cenacle, become its president with the painter Aimé Millet as vice-president. In addition to Delacroix, the committee was composed of painters Albert-Ernest Carrier-Belleuse, Pierre Puvis de Chavannes and among the exhibitors were Léon Bonnat, Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux, Charles-François Daubigny, Laura Fredducci, Gustave Doré and Édouard Manet. After his death, the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts organized a retrospective exhibition of Delacroix”s work in 1864. The same year, Henri-Fantin Latour created his Hommage à Delacroix, a group portrait of ten artists of the Parisian avant-garde (including Charles Baudelaire, James Whistler and Edouard Manet). For these artists of modernity, this painting is a way of claiming a certain kinship with Delacroix (insofar as his style already affirmed a certain freedom from the precepts of the academy).

A true genius, he left many committed works that were often related to current events (The Massacres of Scio or Freedom Guiding the People). He also executed a number of paintings with religious themes (The Crucifixion, The Struggle of Jacob with the Angel, Christ on the Lake of Gennesaret, etc.), although he sometimes declared himself an atheist. In all the fields of his time, he remains the most striking symbol of romantic painting.

The painter”s studio and collections were sold in three days in February 1864 with resounding success.

In 1930, for the centenary of Romanticism, Élie Faure clarified this term attributed to Delacroix. Delacroix is, according to him, more classical than Ingres: “It is easy to show that Ingres, by his deformations more arbitrary than expressive and his lack of intelligence of the rational order of a composition, is both more romantic and less classical despite his realistic and sensual qualities than Delacroix, Barye or Daumier. The definition of the word “romantic” in painting should be broadened, according to Elie Faure: “The greatest of our classics are romantics before the letter, as the builders of cathedrals were four or five centuries ago. And as time goes by, one realizes that Stendhal, Charles Baudelaire, Barye, Balzac, Delacroix naturally take their place with them. Romanticism, in truth, could be reduced to defining itself only by the excess of salience, which is the principle of art itself and of painting above all. But where does this excess begin, where does it end? With the genius precisely. It would therefore be the bad romantics who would define romanticism.

Delacroix”s work will inspire many painters, such as the pointillist Paul Signac or Vincent van Gogh. His paintings show a great mastery of color.

Édouard Manet copies several of Delacroix”s paintings, including Dante”s Boat.

In 1864, Henri Fantin-Latour presented at the Salon, a Tribute to Delacroix, a canvas where we can see Baudelaire, Edouard Manet, James Whistler … gathered around a portrait of the painter.

Paul Signac published in 1911, De Delacroix au néo-impressionnisme in which he made Delacroix the father and inventor of the techniques by divisionism of the color specific to Impressionism.Many painters will claim to Delacroix, among the most important Paul Cézanne, who will copy Bouquets de Fleurs and Medea. He even painted an Apotheosis of Delacroix (1890-94) where landscape painters pray to the master in heaven. He declared to Gasquet in front of the women of Algiers in their apartment: “We are all in this Delacroix”. Degas, who declared that he wanted to combine Ingres and Delacroix, copied, among others, the Bouquets de fleurs by Delacroix in his possession. Degas owned 250 paintings and drawings by Delacroix. Claude Monet, who was inspired by the Views of the English Channel from Dieppe for his paintings, owned Falaises près de Dieppe.

Maurice Denis and the Nabis had a great admiration for Delacroix, both for his work and for his attitude to life as seen in his diary. Maurice Denis participated decisively in the rescue of the painter”s studio.Picasso made a series of paintings and drawings in the 1950s from Des femmes d”Alger dans leur appartement.

This influence on the following generations made him one of the fathers of modern art and contemporary research while Robert Motherwell translated the journal into English.

A public subscription allowed the installation of a monument due to Jules Dalou in the Luxembourg garden in Paris.

Several works of Eugène Delacroix were used for French objects of common use:

In astronomy, are named in his honor (10310) Delacroix, an asteroid of the main asteroid belt, and Delacroix, a crater of the planet Mercury.

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Literary themes

Most of Delacroix”s works are inspired by literature. This was already the case for his La Barque de Dante. So was his Sardanapalus, inspired by a poem by Byron; so was his Boat of Don Juan, from another poem by Byron; and so were many other paintings that came straight out of the works of Shakespeare, Goethe, or other writers, including Walter Scott, Dante, and Victor Hugo. The African Pirates abducting a young woman in the Louvre, would probably be inspired by one of his Orientals (the Pirate Song).

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Religious themes

He also executed a number of paintings with religious themes throughout his career:

Begun in 1822, interrupted in 1824, resumed in 1847 until his death in 1863, Delacroix”s diary is the painter”s literary masterpiece. In it, he notes, day after day, his reflections on painting, poetry or music, as well as Parisian and political life in the middle of the 19th century. He records in long notebooks his discussions with George Sand, with whom he had a deep friendship and political disagreements, his walks with his mistresses, including Baroness Josephine de Forget, whose lover he was for twenty years, and his artistic encounters with Chopin, Chabrier, Dumas, Géricault, Ingres and Rossini… It is a day-to-day testimony not only of the painter”s life, his worries, the progress of his paintings, his melancholy and the evolution of his disease (tuberculosis) that he avoids showing to his relatives, except to his housekeeper and confidante Jenny Le Guillou, Delacroix having never been married, with whom over the years a couple relationship is established, far from the life of the great society, one protecting the other. We can read on Thursday, October 4, 1855: “I cannot express the pleasure I had to see Jenny again. Poor dear woman, the small skinny figure but the sparkling eyes of happiness to whom to speak. I walk back with her, despite the bad weather. I am for several days, and probably will be for the whole time of my stay in Dieppe, under the spell of this meeting with the only being whose heart is mine without reserve. “The first edition of Delacroix”s Diary was published by Plon in 1893 and was revised in 1932 by André Joubin, then reissued in 1980 with a preface by Hubert Damisch with the same publisher. It was not until 2009 that Michèle Hannoosh published a monumental critical version, corrected on the original manuscripts and augmented by recent discoveries.

We also owe to Delacroix the draft of a Dictionary of Fine Arts, assembled and published by Anne Larue, and articles on painting.

(non exhaustive list)

Delacroix had opened a course in 1838 on rue Neuve-Guillemin, which was transferred to rue Neuve-Bréda in 1846. According to Bida, the course was essentially “about the order of the composition”.

Drawings and engravings

According to Alfred Robaut, Eugène Delacroix left 24 engravings and 900 lithographs.

In 1827, the publisher and lithographer Charles Motte persuaded him to illustrate the first French edition of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe”s Faust.

“It is with the French Romantics of the second generation, that race of high-flying, high-ambition artists, such as Delacroix and Berlioz, with a background of disease, something congenitally incurable, true fanatics, of expression, virtuosic to the core…”

– Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, Œuvres philosophiques complètes, Gallimard 1974 p. 267