Eugène Delacroix

• 1. Introduction

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  Eugène Delacroix once heard the poet and critic Baudelaire describe him this way: "Delacroix was passionately in love with passion, but coldly determined to express passion as clearly as possible." That tension defines the French Romantic painter who lived from the 26th of April 1798 to the 13th of August 1863. He was regarded as the leader of the French Romantic school, yet he distrusted sentimentality and bombast. His Romanticism was that of an individualist. Together with his chief rival Ingres, he is counted among the last old Masters of painting, and he was one of the very few who was ever photographed. How did a man who steeped himself in the classics come to chase the exotic across North Africa? Why did his most famous image of liberty get removed from public view? And whose son was he, really? The answers run through scandal, war, music, and a final command to erase his own face.

• 2. A Disputed Father

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  Talleyrand, the powerful French Minister of Foreign Affairs, privately considered himself the real father of Eugène Delacroix. The adult Eugène resembled him in both appearance and character. There were medical reasons to believe that Eugène's legal father, Charles-François Delacroix, could not procreate at the time of the conception. Charles, who suffered from erectile dysfunction, had returned to Paris in early September 1797 to find his wife pregnant.

  Talleyrand had a hand in this domestic drama before the birth. After taking office as foreign minister, he dispatched Charles Delacroix to The Hague as French ambassador to the Batavian Republic. Talleyrand had himself succeeded Charles as Minister of Foreign Affairs. He was already a friend of the family.

  This protection followed Eugène throughout his career. Talleyrand assisted him with numerous anonymous commissions and shielded him as he served the Restoration, then King Louis-Philippe, and finally as ambassador of France in Great Britain. After Talleyrand, the duc de Morny took up the role. Morny was a half-brother of Napoleon III, a grandson of Talleyrand, and speaker of the French House of Commons.

  The family Eugène grew up in had already given much to France. His brother Charles-Henri Delacroix rose to General in Napoleon's army. His brother Henri, born in 1770, was killed at the Battle of Friedland on the 14th of June 1807. His sister Henriette married a diplomat. Charles Delacroix died in 1805 and Eugène's mother in 1814, leaving the boy an orphan at sixteen.

• 3. From David To Rubens

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  In 1815 the young Delacroix began training with Pierre-Narcisse Guérin in the neoclassical style of Jacques-Louis David. His early education had taken him to the Lycée Louis-le-Grand and the Lycée Pierre Corneille in Rouen, where he won awards for drawing. His mother was Victoire Oeben, daughter of the cabinetmaker Jean-François Oeben.

  His first church commissions show a painter pulling away from his teachers. The Virgin of the Harvest, from 1819, carries a Raphael-esque influence. The Virgin of the Sacred Heart, from 1821, shows a freer interpretation. Both came before the deeper pull of the Flemish Baroque painter Peter Paul Rubens and the French artist Théodore Géricault.

  Géricault's The Raft of the Medusa struck Delacroix with profound force. It stimulated him to produce his first major painting, The Barque of Dante, accepted by the Paris Salon of 1822. The public and officialdom largely derided the work, yet the State purchased it for the Luxembourg Galleries. That pattern, widespread opposition countered by vigorous and enlightened support, would continue throughout his life.

  Delacroix took his inspiration from Rubens and the painters of the Venetian Renaissance. He prized colour and movement over clarity of outline and carefully modelled form. This set him directly against the Neoclassical perfectionism of Ingres. He was the friend and spiritual heir to Géricault, and he drew on Lord Byron, sharing Byron's identification with the forces of the sublime in violent action.

• 4. Painting The Greek Cause

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  During the Greek civil wars of 1823 to 1825, Delacroix painted dying Greek civilians rounded up for enslavement by the Ottoman Empire. The Massacre at Chios, which brought him popular success two years after The Barque of Dante, was one of several works he made about contemporary events. It expressed support for the Greek cause in the war of independence against the Turks. The state bought it, and the authorities recognized him as a leading painter in the new Romantic style.

  The picture's despairing tone unsettled many critics. There was no glorious event, no patriots raising swords in valour as in David's Oath of the Horatii, only a disaster. The artist Antoine-Jean Gros called it "a massacre of art." The detail of an infant clutching its dead mother had an especially powerful effect, though critics condemned it as unfit for art. After viewing the paintings of John Constable and the watercolour sketches of Richard Parkes Bonnington, Delacroix made extensive, freely painted changes to the sky and distant landscape.

  A second painting honoured the same cause. Greece Expiring on the Ruins of Missolonghi referred to the capture of Missolonghi by Turkish forces in 1825. A woman in Greek costume stands with her breast bared, arms half-raised in an imploring gesture. Behind her lies the suicide of the Greeks, who chose to kill themselves and destroy their city rather than surrender. A single hand is visible at the bottom, the body crushed by rubble. Delacroix cared about Missolonghi for another reason too. The poet Byron, whom he greatly admired, had died there.

• 5. Violence And The Exotic

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  A trip to England in 1825 sent Delacroix to Thomas Lawrence and Richard Parkes Bonington, whose colour and handling shaped his only full-length portrait, the elegant Portrait of Louis-Auguste Schwiter, painted between 1826 and 1830. Around the same time he was beginning romantic works on themes that would hold him for over thirty years. By 1825 he was producing lithographs illustrating Shakespeare, and soon after, lithographs and paintings from Goethe's Faust. The Combat of the Giaour and Hassan, from 1826, and Woman with Parrot, from 1827, introduced the violence and sensuality that would recur in his art.

  The Death of Sardanapalus, painted between 1827 and 1828, pulled these strands together. The Assyrian king watches impassively as guards carry out his orders to kill his servants, concubines, and animals. The scene blazes with colour, exotic costume, and tragedy. Its literary source is a play by Byron, though that play never mentions any massacre of concubines.

  The painting was not exhibited again for many years. Some critics have regarded it as a gruesome fantasy of death and lust. In the foreground, placed for maximum impact, a nude woman struggles as her throat is about to be cut. Yet the sensuous beauty and exotic colour make the picture appear pleasing and shocking at once.

  The Murder of the Bishop of Liège, from 1829, again synthesized his Romantic interests. Borrowed from Scott, it depicts the murder of Louis de Bourbon during an orgy sponsored by his captor, William de la Marck. Delacroix built the immense vaulted interior from sketches of the Palais de Justice in Rouen and Westminster Hall. The drama plays out in chiaroscuro around a brilliantly lit stretch of tablecloth. In 1855 a critic wrote that the work was "left by the painter at that supreme moment when one more stroke of the brush would have ruined everything."

• 6. Liberty Removed From View

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  Liberty Leading the People arrived in 1830 as Delacroix's most influential work. Parisians take up arms and march forward under the tricolour, the banner of liberty, equality, and fraternity. Warriors lie dead in the foreground, a poignant counterpoint to the symbolic female figure illuminated against a background of smoke. The picture's choice of subject and technique sharpened the line between the Romantic approach and the neoclassical style. It even parted from Géricault's Romanticism in The Raft of the Medusa.

  Delacroix was not glorifying the actual event. The 1830 revolution against Charles X did little other than bring a different king, Louis Philippe I, to power. He thought of his figures and crowds as types and conceived the composition as a whole. He sought to convey the will and character of the people rather than the event itself.

  The French government bought the painting, then turned against it. By 1832 officials deemed its glorification of liberty too inflammatory and removed it from public view. Even so, Delacroix kept receiving government commissions for murals and ceiling paintings.

  Its return came with a new regime. After the Revolution of 1848 ended the reign of Louis Philippe, the newly elected president Louis Napoleon, later Napoleon III, finally put the painting on display. It now hangs in the Louvre in Paris, though from December 2012 until 2014 it was shown at Louvre-Lens. The boy holding a pistol aloft on the right is sometimes thought to have inspired the Gavroche character in Victor Hugo's 1862 novel, Les Misérables.

• 7. The Door To Morocco

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  "The Greeks and Romans are here at my door, in the Arabs who wrap themselves in a white blanket and look like Cato or Brutus," Delacroix wrote. In 1832 he traveled to Spain and North Africa with the diplomat Charles-Edgar de Mornay, part of a diplomatic mission to Morocco shortly after the French conquered Algeria. He went not primarily to study art, but to escape the civilization of Paris and to glimpse a more primitive culture.

  The people and their clothes entranced him. He produced over 100 paintings and drawings of scenes from North African life, adding a new and personal chapter to the interest in Orientalism. He believed these North Africans offered a visual equivalent to the people of Classical Rome and Greece.

  Some subjects resisted him. He sketched some women secretly in Algiers, as in Women of Algiers in their Apartment from 1834, but generally struggled to find Muslim women to pose, since Muslim rules required that women be covered. Jewish women posed more freely, becoming subjects for the Jewish Wedding in Morocco from 1839.

  While in Tangier he sketched the people and the city, subjects he would return to until the end of his life. Animals, the embodiment of romantic passion, entered paintings such as Arab Horses Fighting in a Stable from 1860 and Arab Saddling his Horse from 1855. He painted many versions of The Lion Hunt between 1856 and 1861.

• 8. Music, Faith, And A Final Will

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  "Nothing can be compared with the emotion caused by music; that it expresses incomparable shades of feeling," Delacroix said in 1855. While working at Saint-Sulpice, he said music put him in a state of exaltation that inspired his painting. He drew the most feeling from the melancholy renditions of Chopin or the pastoral works of Beethoven. He befriended the composer Chopin, made portraits of him, and praised him frequently in his journal.

  Delacroix painted hundreds of religious works and held a strong interest in Christianity, even while considered an unbeliever or agnostic. Christ on the Sea of Galilee exists in multiple painted versions. His Pietà, the Virgin Mary mourning Christ, was eventually redone by Vincent van Gogh. From 1857 to 1861 he worked on frescoes for the Chapelle des Anges at Saint-Sulpice, including "Jacob Wrestling with the Angel" and "Saint Michael Slaying the Dragon."

  The public commissions stretched across decades. He worked on the Salon du Roi in the Palais Bourbon from 1833, painted the ceiling in the Galerie d'Apollon of the Louvre from 1848 to 1850, and began a lifelong friendship with the artist Marie-Élisabeth Blavot-Boulanger. From 1834 until his death, his housekeeper Jeanne-Marie le Guillou guarded his privacy, and her devotion prolonged his life.

  The winter of 1862 to 1863 was rough. A severe throat infection worsened over the season. On the 1st of June he returned to Paris to see his doctor. He rallied briefly, but by the 15th of July the doctor said he could do nothing more, and the only food Delacroix could eat was fruit. He wrote his will, leaving a gift for each friend and money for Jenny Le Guillou. He added a clause forbidding any representation of his features: "whether by a death-mask or by drawing or by photography. I forbid it, expressly." On the 13th of August he died with Jenny by his side, and was buried in Père Lachaise Cemetery. At the sale of his work in 1864, 9,140 works were attributed to him, including 853 paintings and 6,629 drawings, a body of work that would inspire a generation of impressionists, with Renoir and Manet copying his paintings and Degas buying his portrait of Baron Schwiter.