DELACROIX, Eugène

This haunting oil study of an old woman in despair, prepared for the Massacre at Chios, was taken from a Parisian model.

Suggested listening (streaming mp3, 9 minutes):

Antonio Vivaldi: Sonata in D minor RV 62 op. 1 No. 12 (La Follia)

Delacroix’s Romanticism is virtually the opposite of German artists’ interpretation of the style. But his interest in depicting animals - the lions in the grip of death’s fury, the spirited horses, alongside which the humans seem like frozen statues - connects him with the prose of German Romantic writers, in which the theme of the human in the beast and the bestial in the human plays a substantial role.

Delacroix’s experience of English artists is reflected here, alongside the influence of Venetian painting and the works of Rubens. A critic remarked: “The colour of this piece is as beautiful as some landscape imagined by Byron as the setting for the bloodstained body of one of the tyrants of Missolonghi.”

Delacroix painted flower paintings and landscapes in his later years. The symbolic import typical of Delacroix’s subjects seems here to be lacking. They might be described as an early case of ‘art for art’s sake’. Delacroix took time off from his exhausting monumental labours to paint the flowers in the garden of his friend George Sand.

Suggested listening (streaming mp3, 2 minutes):

Franz Schubert: Blumenlied (Flower Song) D 431

Delacroix frequently went with his friend, the animal sculptor Barye, to see the big game in the Jardin des Plantes.

This painting decorates the ceiling of the Galerie d’Apollon in the Louvre.

Delacroix’s greatest virtuosity was reserved for a project which came in 1850, between the decoration of the Senate and Palais Bourbon libraries and the monumental Salon de la Paix at the Hotel de Ville, and was the most important commission of Delacroix’s life. It was nothing less than the decoration of the Galerie d’Apollon in the Louvre. Following a fire, Le Vau had reconstructed this historical gallery for Louis XIV, while the decoration was entrusted to Charles Le Brun. Then in 1678, Louis left Paris for Versailles, and work ceased. In 1793, in the wake of the French Revolution, the Louvre became a museum, and the Second Republic deemed the completion of the decoration a republican duty.

Le Brun had intended a subject dear to the heart of the Sun King: Apollo on his chariot. For Delacroix, to make his mark at the very heart of the Louvre and to do so not by exhibiting paintings but by decorating the central part of a ceiling was a thrilling opportunity. Before he began, he felt the need to study the works of Rubens in Belgium.

In his Apollo Slays Python, Delacroix retained Le Brun’s ambition to portray the mythological figure of Apollo in the gallery of that name. But Delacroix enhanced Le Brun’s allegory with a further allegory close to his own heart: intelligence wrestling with barbarity and light struggling with darkness. By emphasising the contrast between the two parts of his composition, the world of the sun above and that of darkness beneath, Delacroix transformed Le Brun’s project and raised it to the plane of an eternal symbol.

The subject, which Delacroix took from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, is effectively the victory of Good over Evil. But it takes the form of beauty vanquishing the ugly and genius dispelling stupidity.

This is a study for the ceiling painting of the Galerie d’Apollon in the Louvre.

The subject, which Delacroix took from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, is effectively the victory of Good over Evil. But it takes the form of beauty vanquishing the ugly and genius dispelling stupidity.

This is the central panel of the vaulted ceiling of the Galerie d’Apollon in the Louvre.

One of Delacroix’s lesser-known masterpieces, the subject-matter was dictated by its destination. Apollo Vanquishing the Python shows the painter working in a direct line from the great decorators of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, without losing any of his own ardor or lyricism.

G�ricault had inspired in Delacroix his fascination with horses, the emblematic beasts of Romantic painting. But his love of horses was fully satisfied only in Morocco. Thereafter the Arab horses that he had seen and drawn during his voyage constituted a kind of repertoire. For one of his last paintings, Arab Horses Fighting in a Stable, he drew on a scene that he had witnessed in Tangier, when the horses of Mornay and the English Consul were fighting. No anatomical studies lie behind this painting. Once again, it is the violence of the combat that he portrays; the power and energy of the animals, an effect emphasised by the strong contrasts of light and shade.

This drawing is a study to the painting executed c. 1824.

Delacroix decorated the walls of the library of the Palais Bourbon: two great semidomes eleven metres by eight situated on either side of the room. Delacroix decided to decorate them with allegorical subjects, one representing barbarity, Attila and His Hordes Overrun Italy and the Arts, and the other civilisation: Orpheus Civilizes the Greeks. There were in addition five little domes or bays, which would present the divisions adopted in all libraries, while not following the classification too exactly: Sciences, Philosophy, Legislation, Theology and Poetry.

By making such a striking contrast between his two allegorical subjects, Delacroix contrived to symbolise War and Peace, the two poles of human conduct.

Delacroix painted flower paintings and landscapes in his later years. The symbolic import typical of Delacroix’s subjects seems here to be lacking. They might be described as an early case of ‘art for art’s sake’. Delacroix took time off from his exhausting monumental labours to paint the flowers in the garden of his friend George Sand.

Suggested listening (streaming mp3, 7 minutes):

Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky: The Nutcracker, ballet suite, op. 71, Waltz of the Flowers

This drawing is a study after Rubens’s Christ on the Cross (Le Coup de Lance) in Antwerp (Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten).

The reign of Louis-Philippe saw a return to the great tradition of French religious painting. Commissions were forthcoming. When Delacroix came to paint one of the most anguished representations of the crucifixion, his Christ on the Cross, it was to Rubens and his Christ on the Cross (Le Coup de Lance) that he returned.

Suggested listening (streaming mp3, 22 minutes):

Heinrich Sch�tz: Die sieben Worte am Kreuz SWV 478

This scene is based on an incident recounted in three Gospels of the New Testament: a furious storm breaks out while Jesus and his disciples sail across the Lake of Gennezaret (Sea of Galilee) to spread Christ’s message. To the disciples’ amazement, Jesus calms the wind and the storm, dramatizing the power of Christian belief. Delacroix produced multiple variations on this theme in 1853 and 1854, when this particular biblical subject became popular with French Catholics during the reign of Louis-Napol�on (r. 1852-70).

The influence of G�ricault’s The Raft of the Medusa can be traced in this painting.

Cleopatra and the Peasant allows Delacroix to contrast beauty and ugliness, illustrating the mixture of the sublime and the grotesque that, in his view, typified Shakespeare’s art. The source of the painting is indeed Anthony and Cleopatra, though certain critics have cited the name of Plutarch. This is the denouement; Cleopatra stares in fascination at the asp.

Suggested listening (streaming mp3, 14 minutes):

Jules Massenet: Cleopatra, Cleopatra’s aria

The Combat of the Giaour and the Pasha, which Delacroix repeated in various versions, illustrates the conflict in Byron’s poem, in which the Christian Giaour, an outcast Venetian warrior, is about to slay the Turk Hassan to avenge his mistress, Leila, who had fled from the Turk’s harem. On being recaptured, she was flung into the sea, her punishment for infidelity.

The picture shows the Justice (260 x 1100 cm), the Mediterranean (300 x 118 cm) and the Ocean (300 x 118 cm).

By a decree dated 31 August, 1833, Delacroix was commissioned to undertake his first state decoration, that of the Salon du Roi or Throne Room of the Palais Bourbon. This was the first of a succession of major commissions, on which Delacroix continued to lavish his talents until illness intervened. Between 1833 and 1854, Delacroix’s monumental compositions spread across the Salon du Roi, the Library of the Palais du Luxembourg, the Galerie d’Apollon in the Louvre and the Salon de la Paix in the Hotel de Ville.

This was a different matter from even the largest easel paintings. Delacroix had now to exercise his imagination on huge surfaces of very various shape: domes, ceilings, semidomes, friezes, pilasters, and coffering. The essence of decorative painting is unity with the architectural framework that it invests. It was this aspect of the commissions that offered Delacroix the greatest opportunity for experiment and enabled him to give of his best.

Like Michelangelo when he began the decoration of the Sistine Chapel, Delacroix knew nothing about the technique of fresco. So before executing the first commission, Delacroix spent several weeks with his family in the abbaye de Valmont, in Normandy, experimenting with fresco. These experiments enabled him to invent his own technique. Aware of the limitations of distemper, and noting that fresco did not easily adapt to the climate, he decided to paint the walls of the Salon du Roi with oil, to which he added a little colourless wax or encaustic. This allowed him to imitate the mat surface of fresco and protect the colours from the effects of damp; it also made it possible to retouch his work, which the use of distemper would have ruled out. This was the technique that he used for all subsequent decorations.

Throughout 1837, Delacroix worked alone on the Salon du Roi, accepting assistance only for certain ornaments, and in 1838, the public could finally admire the finished work. It comprised four large sections of a coffered ceiling each decorated with a large allegorical figure in classical dress: Justice, Agriculture, Industry and War. In addition, there were four little coffers representing Putti bearing emblems. On the pilasters, he personified the rivers of France and the seas or oceans that they flow into, such as The Garonne and The Mediterranean. A frieze running round the upper wall above the windows and doors echoes these themes, contrasting the evils of war with the virtues of justice, industry and agriculture.

In the centre: Franz Liszt, Delacroix, George Sand and Fr�d�ric Chopin represented as birds of paradise.

Of all the artists of his time, as The Barque of Dante and The Shipwreck of Don Juan illustrate, Delacroix is undoubtedly the most literary in inspiration. From the moment he began to paint, first under the undemanding supervision of his teacher, the academic Gu�rin, then at G�ricault’s side, the young Delacroix never ceased to build on the solid literary education that he had received at the Lyc�e Imperial (now the Lyc�e Louis-le-Grand).

It was in England that Delacroix’s relation to literature received a determining impetus. The world of Goethe was revealed to him by a performance of Faust given by an English company. For Delacroix, the key figure is not Faust, but, of course, Mephistopheles, demonic and Romantic in equal measure. He executed seventeen plates representing scenes from Goethe’s Faust.

Predictably, the critics censored what they saw as technical eccentricity - Delacroix’s almost completely inked plates and slashing use of the scraper. In their view, his forms and figures lacked purity and his poses were excessively contorted. But Goethe himself was delighted. Eckermann recorded his jjudgment: “‘It must be admitted,’ said Goethe, ‘that I myself scarcely imagined the scene so perfectly! M. Delacroix is a great artist of exceptional talent, who has found in Faust precisely the subject that suits him. The French criticise his impulsive style; but here it is just what is required. He will - at least, I hope he will - illustrate the whole of Faust, and I look forward to the pleasure of seeing it, particularly the witches’ kitchen and the Brocken scenes. Clearly Delacroix has a profound knowledge of life; in such matters a city like Paris is the perfect teacher.‘”

Suggested listening (streaming mp3, 14 minutes):

Charles Gounod: Faust, Ballet music

Of all the artists of his time, as The Barque of Dante and The Shipwreck of Don Juan illustrate, Delacroix is undoubtedly the most literary in inspiration. From the moment he began to paint, first under the undemanding supervision of his teacher, the academic Gu�rin, then at G�ricault’s side, the young Delacroix never ceased to build on the solid literary education that he had received at the Lyc�e Imperial (now the Lyc�e Louis-le-Grand).

It was in England that Delacroix’s relation to literature received a determining impetus. The world of Goethe was revealed to him by a performance of Faust given by an English company. For Delacroix, the key figure is not Faust, but, of course, Mephistopheles, demonic and Romantic in equal measure. He executed seventeen plates representing scenes from Goethe’s Faust.

Predictably, the critics censored what they saw as technical eccentricity - Delacroix’s almost completely inked plates and slashing use of the scraper. In their view, his forms and figures lacked purity and his poses were excessively contorted. But Goethe himself was delighted. Eckermann recorded his jjudgment: “‘It must be admitted,’ said Goethe, ‘that I myself scarcely imagined the scene so perfectly! M. Delacroix is a great artist of exceptional talent, who has found in Faust precisely the subject that suits him. The French criticise his impulsive style; but here it is just what is required. He will - at least, I hope he will - illustrate the whole of Faust, and I look forward to the pleasure of seeing it, particularly the witches’ kitchen and the Brocken scenes. Clearly Delacroix has a profound knowledge of life; in such matters a city like Paris is the perfect teacher.‘”

There is a manifest sensuality to this dreaming woman with her body offered up to the spectator’s gaze, and we know from the Journal that Delacroix’s relations with his models often went beyond the pictorial; but there are also traces of the influence of Bonington in the presentation, and perhaps of Delacroix’s desire to emulate Ingres’ nudes.

This is a study to one of the figures in The Death of Sardanapalus.

The picture is a fragment cut out of a larger painting portraying Chopin beside George Sand.

Fr�d�ric Fran�ois Chopin (1810-1849) was a Polish pianist and composer. He is widely regarded as one of the most famous, influential and admired composers for the piano.

He was born Fryderyk Franciszek Chopin in the village of ¯elazowa Wola, Poland, to a Polish mother and French expatriate father. Hailed as a child prodigy in his homeland, Chopin left for Paris at the age of 20. In Paris, he made a career as a performer and teacher as well as a composer, and adopted the French variant of his name, “Fr�d�ric-Fran�ois”. He had a turbulent 10-year relationship with the French writer George Sand from 1837 to 1847. Always in fragile health, he succumbed to pulmonary tuberculosis at the age of 39.

Suggested listening (streaming mp3, 4 minutes):

Fryderik Chopin: Waltz No 7 In C Sharp Minor Op 64, No 2

George Sand (original name Aurore Dupin) was a free-spirited French Romantic writer. She scandalized 19th-century Paris when she defied convention and pioneered an independent path for women. She was noted for her numerous love affairs with such prominent figures as Prosper Merim�e, Alfred de Musset, Fr�d�ric Chopin, and others. Delacroix did not take her very seriously, but Chateaubriand was inspired of her work.

The painting is unfinished.

Suggested listening (streaming mp3, 4 minutes):

Fryderik Chopin: Waltz No 7 In C Sharp Minor Op 64, No 2

After The Massacre at Chios, Greece made a second appearance in Delacroix’s work in 1827. Its symbol was a young woman in national costume standing on a block of stone from which there emerges the hand of a dead insurgent. Greece on the Ruins of Missolonghi elicited an immediate response from Baudelaire: “The audacity of Michelangelo and the fecundity of Rubens.” Others disagreed; they would have preferred Delacroix to be less “exuberant”.

Delacroix discovered Shakespeare in 1825 on a trip to London, where the celebrated Edmund Kean was playing Richard III. In Paris, the equally famous Talma - whose town house was decorated by Delacroix - did much to popularise Shakespeare’s work in French. Delacroix saw Hamlet in Paris, in the company of Hugo, de Vigny, Dumas, Nerval and Berlioz.

The Shakespearean hero, imperfect, immoderate and immature, was perfectly adapted to Delacroix’s temperament, and gave free rein to his imagination; in his hands, the hero could be completed and perfected. It was, of course, Hamlet who most fascinated Delacroix.

“Alas, poor Yorick! - I knew him, Horatio: a fellow of most infinite jest…” (Act V, Scene 1). The scene of Hamlet and Horatio in the Graveyard inspired a painting and a series of lithographs which mirror the development of his art as a whole.

Delacroix discovered Shakespeare in 1825 on a trip to London, where the celebrated Edmund Kean was playing Richard III. In Paris, the equally famous Talma - whose town house was decorated by Delacroix - did much to popularise Shakespeare’s work in French. Delacroix saw Hamlet in Paris, in the company of Hugo, de Vigny, Dumas, Nerval and Berlioz.

The Shakespearean hero, imperfect, immoderate and immature, was perfectly adapted to Delacroix’s temperament, and gave free rein to his imagination; in his hands, the hero could be completed and perfected. It was, of course, Hamlet who most fascinated Delacroix.

“Alas, poor Yorick! - I knew him, Horatio: a fellow of most infinite jest…” (Act V, Scene 1). The scene of Hamlet and Horatio in the Graveyard inspired a painting and a series of lithographs which mirror the development of his art as a whole.

The scene of Faust and Mephisto Gallop through the Night of the Witches’ Sabbath is an illustration for Goethe’s Faust, Verse 4399-4404. In this work everything is movement and expression.

Suggested listening (streaming mp3, 14 minutes):

Charles Gounod: Faust, Ballet music

Jacob Wrestling with the Angel has been read as a summary of Delacroix’s life and work. Indeed the leitmotif of his career is the struggle - a spiritual combat - between his aspiration to classicism and his Romantic genius, between his admiration for Racine and his love of Shakespeare.

Delacroix greatly admired animals, especially wild beasts and their exotic beauty, energy and graceful movement. In this painting he skillfully depicts the moment of high drama.

The number of major paintings that derive from Delacroix’s Moroccan notes and sketchbooks is clear proof of the impact of the experience. They include the Jewish Wedding in Morocco, The Fanatics of Tangier and The Sultan of Morocco and his Entourage. In the composition of these works, Delacroix scrupulously observed the notes and sketches that he had made in situ. Thus the decor of the Jewish Wedding in Morocco exactly matches that recorded in a watercolour in the notebook, while his notes give an exact description of the painting that was to come.

This painting was exhibited at the Salon of 1841.

Art historians enumerated the many reminiscences in the decoration of the Salon du Roi. They form part of the ‘dictionary’ that Delacroix had constituted for his own use, and a recreation in his own colours and forms of illustrious works from the past. Thus, In the frieze of Justice, the old man offers a clear parallel with the Prophet Jeremiah in the Sistine Chapel.

The Liberty Leading the People is a sort of epic narrative of the woman who quits her hearth to espouse a great cause. There is a carpet of bodies beneath her feet as she leads the ravening crowd. Her naked breasts have come to embody the social virtues of Republicanism, a point officially acknowledged by the generous diffusion of the image in the form of French stamps. It is also the first modern political composition. It marks the moment at which Romanticism abandoned its classical sources of inspiration to take up an emphatic role in contemporary life. Delacroix enrolled as a garde national, and in this role he portrayed himself, wearing a top hat, to the left of Liberty. The young drummer brandishing his pistols to the right of Liberty was, perhaps, the inspiration for the character Gavroche, in Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables, written thirty years later. Delacroix’s influences - Goya, Gros, and, above all, G�ricault - are clearly apparent.

Suggested listening (streaming mp3, 2 minutes):

Claude-Joseph Rouget de L’Isle: Marsellaise, French national anthem

Contemporary criticism focused on the eroticism of the bare breasts, the dirty skin and the suggestion of hair at the armpits. These were taken to indicate that the goddess of liberty was a woman of the people, a fishwife, a Venus of the streets and not a countess from the Faubourg Saint-Germain.

Thirty years later, Victor Hugo immortalised the urchin as Gavroche, in Les Miserables.

Delacroix enrolled as a ‘garde national,’ and in this role he portrayed himself, wearing a top hat, to the left of Liberty .

This painting is a sketch. The final version is in the Art Institute of Chicago.

Delacroix visited Morocco in 1832 as part of a French delegation sent by King Louis-Philippe after the conquest of Algeria. His impressions of North Africa left their mark on all his subsequent work,and sketches he made during the journey formed the basis of a host of painted variations. Here the subject is stripped of exotic details and subordinated to the unbridled energy of painting that is founded on the contrast of complementary colours, which Delacroix was the first to employ consistently as a means of artistic expression.

This painting illustrates an episode from Brantome’s Vies des dames galantes; the Duke lifts a veil from his nude mistress for the edification of his chamberlain. However, he takes care to conceal her face, for she is, in fact, the chamberlain’s wife. It seems probable that Delacroix, always short of money, chose this subject in hopes of a quick sale. The style and thematic presentation owe much to Delacroix’s English friend Bonington, however, the rich colours and textures and the extraordinary virtuosity of the brushwork are pure Delacroix. A series of superlative nudes followed from this precedent.

Delacroix’s grandest pictures have never left their country of origin. Only in Paris can we fully appreciate the bold reconciliation of beauty with cruelty, sensuality with control, fantasy with observation, modernity with tradition that characterises the art of this influential painter.’

As Byron signifies Romantic poetry, so Romantic French art means above all Delacroix. Like Byron he achieved his flamboyant artistic effects through intense intellectual application and a firm grasp of technique. Pupil of an academic artist, he was essentially self-taught through the study of the great Renaissance and seventeenth-century colourists in the Louvre. He was fascinated by the vibrant brushwork of the Venetians and their Flemish heir Rubens, imitating their capacity to simulate brilliant daylight even in the shadows, their use of colour instead of line as the primary structural element. It was precisely these effects which, as employed by Constable in the Hay-Wain exhibited at the Paris Salon in 1824, caused a sensation and further exacerbated Delacroix’s fashionable Anglomania. In 1825, having sold his picture of the Massacre of Chios to the French State, he set out for London with two English friends, the watercolourists Richard Bonington and Thales Fielding. They visited galleries and the theatre and read English poets. Delacroix met other English artists, including Thomas Lawrence. Appropriately for a painting in an English collection, the lifesize likeness of Louis-Auguste Schwiter, painted after Delacroix’s return to Paris, is an essay in the portrait style of Lawrence.

Schwiter, a lifelong friend of Delacroix, was himself a painter. He is presented here, however, as a gentleman, dressed in elegant black and hat in hand, standing on what appears to be the terrace of a great country house, as if waiting to be admitted. The blue Chinese vase with its heavily paint-textured flowers contrasts with the red lining of his hat. Like the trumpet vine clippings on the paving, these touches of colour serve to relate the foreground to the brooding sunset landscape (said to have been painted in part by Paul Huet, another artist friend), thus counteracting the isolation of Schwiter’s monochrome silhouette.

The portrait is lit from the right, a reversal of the more usual illumination from the left, highlighting the left side of the sitter’s face and perhaps helping to account for the curiously tentative impression he gives, despite his firm stance in the centre of the picture and his direct gaze. The unemphatic ‘modern’ pose, with its hint of English-style reserve, and the free ‘unfinished’ brushwork made this full-length portrait, at once so formal and so unconventional, unacceptable to the judges of the 1827 Paris Salon exhibition, and it was rejected. Delacroix later reworked the painting, finally completing it in 1830.

The picture shows an illustration for Goethe’s Faust.

Delacroix was also a superb lithographer. He had a notable success with his illustrations to Goethe’s Faust, which the German poet preferred to versions by other artists, These are the works in which Delacroix, inspired perhaps by the satanic subject matter, came closest to achieving Gothic effect.

As to the Medea in this painting, no heroine could better express the destructive power of women, a theme dear to the Romantics as it was to their successors, the Symbolists. Repudiated by Jason, Medea takes her revenge by killing the two children she has born to him; the subject is taken from Euripides’ tragedy, Medea.

This pcture is a reduced version, made in 1862, of Delacroix’s large painting (260 x 165 cm) exhibited at the Salon of 1838, now in the Mus�e du Lille.

Delacroix seems here to identify with Michelangelo, whom he greatly admired, finding in him a symbol of his own predicament as a misunderstood artist. Michelangelo is seen wearing a red scarf, an accoutrement for which Delacroix was famous.

The number of major paintings that derive from Delacroix’s Moroccan notes and sketchbooks is clear proof of the impact of the experience. They include the Jewish Wedding in Morocco, The Fanatics of Tangier and The Sultan of Morocco and his Entourage. In the composition of these works, Delacroix scrupulously observed the notes and sketches that he had made in situ. Thus the decor of the Jewish Wedding in Morocco exactly matches that recorded in a watercolour in the notebook, while his notes give an exact description of the painting that was to come.

Delacroix made many pencil sketdhes and watercolours in situ for the Women of Algiers. This is one of the watercolours.

This painting belongs to a series of nudes, which includes the Female Nude Reclining on a Divan in the Louvre and the Woman with a Parrot in the Mus�e des Beaux-Arts, Lyons.

On this page the self-portrait of the artist heads of women can be found.

The Paris of the Romantic era was under the spell of Scott and Byron. The historical novel was all the rage, and the French Romantics, notably Hugo and Dumas pere, were subject to this combined influence. As early as 1821, when he was twenty-three years old, Delacroix painted himself as Ravenswood, Lucy’s lover in Sir Walter Scott’s novel The Bride of Lammermoor (1819).

Suggested listening (streaming mp3, 4 minutes):

Gaetano Donizetti: Lucia di Lammermoor, Act II, Sextet

The influence of G�ricault’s The Raft of the Medusa can be traced in this painting.

The success of the Apollo had taken Delacroix somewhat unaware; he was not used to a favourable critical consensus. He made the most of it by applying for and obtaining the commission to decorate one of the Salons of the new Hotel de Ville. This was to be his last work of non-religious monumental painting. It is also the only one not to have survived; it perished when the town hall burnt down during the Commune in 1871. Of the two Salons of this new building, the north facing Salon de la Paix fell to Delacroix; the south salon was commissioned from Ingres. We know little about Delacroix’s scheme of decoration, only that it took him two years of what he described as “titanic” labours. We also know that the room was very badly illuminated and that he had to rework the tonality of his entire composition.

All that remains today are some sketches and a certain number of preparatory drawings. The ceiling was to have been occupied by a huge allegory. Peace Descends to Earth, of which nothing has survived but a sketch.

As the acknowledged master of monumental civic decoration, Delacroix could afford to stand aside from one of the major enterprises of his time, the decoration of religious monuments. But the Saints-Anges chapel at the church of Saint-Sulpice provided the opportunity for a kind of last testament. By a decree dated 28 April, 1849, Delacroix was commissioned to decorate a chapel at Saint-Sulpice. However, the urgent demands made by his numerous civic commissions and the doubtful state of his health hindered him fulfilling the decree. Only twelve years later, in 1861, did he complete the chapel. Given that it was consecrated to the Holy Angels, Delacroix chose to represent Saint Michael Defeats the Devil on the ceiling, and Jacob Wrestling with the Angel and Heliodorus Driven from the Temple on the walls. Now badly weakened by illness, he relied heavily on the help of his faithful assistants, Pierre Andrieu and Louis Boulange.

This time there was no critical consensus. There was praise for the delicate gradation of tones in the Heliodorus, which was compared to Veronese and Raphael, while Michelangelo was cited in relation to the muscular brutality of Jacob. But contemporary critics were blind to Delacroix’s originality in replacing the traditional architectural background with a natural landscape. His very rich and various palette, the harmony of the colours, and, in particular, the subtlety of the greens in the foliage, prefigure the work of Corot. Delacroix here shows himself the father of Impressionism. Jacob Wrestling with the Angel has been read as a summary of Delacroix’s life and work. Indeed the leitmotif of his career is the struggle - a spiritual combat - between his aspiration to classicism and his Romantic genius, between his admiration for Racine and his love of Shakespeare.

This painting, painted at Beffes for General Coetlosquet, was one of the splendid collection of works which Delacroix sent to the Salon of 1827, and which included the Death of Sardanapalus as well as others from among his finest pictures. On 28 September 1827, Delacroix wrote to his friend Soulier: ‘I have finished the General’s animal picture, and I have dug up a rococo frame for it, which I have had regilded and which will do for it splendidly. It has already dazzled people at a gathering of amateurs, and I think it would be amusing to see it in the Salon.’

Of all Delacroix’s paintings, the Still-Life with Lobster reveals most clearly the impression made on the young artist by English painting. The background with its red-coated huntsmen is reminiscent of landscapes by Constable; the dead game in the foreground, and the incongruous lobster, rival the finest details in the works of Jan Fyt.

Delacroix painted this picture when he returned from England; even before then, he was in close touch with English painters in Paris - Fielding and Bonington amongst others. But it was at the Salon of 1824 that he discovered the revolution which Constable had brought about in English painting, when he saw the three landscapes which the latter was exhibiting there. He hastily repainted the background of the Massacre of Scio along much the same lines; when the state bought the picture from him for 6,000 francs (a considerable sum in those days) he lost no time in spending the money on a trip to England. This opened up a new world to him: the Parthenon marbles, the Gothic style, the paintings of Lawrence and Etty, the horses (his host was the horsedealer Elmore), sailing in a yacht - a sport he was able to indulge in with an aristocratic friend of Elmore’s - and the plays of Shakespeare. English painting had attracted a whole colony of French artists to London; among them Eug�ne Isabey, Eug�ne Lami, and Henri Monnier. Delacroix also renewed contact with Bonington, and worked in company with him. He was in London when he heard of the heroic death of Lord Byron, to whom he pays tribute in his Journal.

This is a study for the decoration of the Salon du Roi in the Palais Bourbon, Paris.

Some ten years before the pre-impressionist generation, Delacroix notably sketched in pastel or watercolour a series of studies of skies that reveal an astonishingly modern sense of space and of the fleeting quality of light effects.

Torquato Tasso (1544-1595), Italian poet, one of the foremost writers and a tragic figure of the Renaissance. In 1565 he joined the court of Alfonso d’Este, Duke of Ferrara, where he wrote the first version of his masterpiece, Jerusalem Delivered (Ital. Gerusalemme liberata), an epic of the exploits of Godfrey of Boulogne during the First Crusade. He was frustrated by conditions at court, where he felt unappreciated by his patrons and envied by his colleagues. Psychologically unstable, he developed a persecution complex that led to a fit of violence in 1579. He was imprisoned in a convent from which he escaped. In 1579 he returned to Ferrara, but was confined in a madhouse, where he remained until 1586.

For Romantics like Delacroix, Tasso, shut up in his Ferrarese prison, was to be the epitome of the artist-hero who suffers for his art and beliefs.

As a rich source for exotic and dramatically violent themes, the novels of Sir Walter Scott were immensely popular with Romantic painters. Delacroix, despite his reservations about their literary merit, repeatedly found inspiration in these writings. This picture, painted in 1846 and exhibited in the Salon of that year, illustrates an episode from Scott’s Ivanhoe, in which the beautiful Rebecca is carried off by two Saracen slaves at the command of the Christian knight who has long coveted her. Intense drama is created as much by the contorted poses and compacted space as by the artist’s use of vivid color. Contemporary critics, including Baudelaire, praised the work’s spontaneity and power.

Delacroix’s treatment of subjects from fashionable works frequently raised critical hackles, and he was assailed in the name of good taste, the Beautiful, and the Ideal. A notable victim of such disparagement was the scene drawn from Scott’s Ivanhoe. The version of the The Abduction of Rebecca, now in the Louvre, was exhibited at the 1859 Salon, and shows Rebecca carried off by Sir Brian de Bois-Guilbert, while in the background flames engulf Torquilstone Castle.

The first of Delacroix’s paintings to achieve true notoriety, Dante and Virgil in Hell or The Barque of Dante, exemplifies a duality that pervaded his entire career. The shared influence of Michelangelo and Rubens is manifest here, but there is also a savour of the revolution so thunderously proclaimed by his friend and elder, Theodore G�ricault, in his immortal painting, The Raft of the Medusa (1819).

The Barque of Dante was submitted to the Salon in 1822, and makes clear acknowledgement of its debt to G�ricault’s The Raft of the Medusa. Indeed, the influence of that painting can be traced for many years afterwards in Delacroix’s work, for example, in his Christ on the Lake of Gennesaret (1854) or The Shipwreck of Don Juan (1840). The ‘stage-setting’ of The Barque of Dante looks forward to Baudelaire’s pronouncement that Delacroix is an ‘essentially literary’ painter. But Delacroix had something much more important to leam from the Raft. In expressing the predicament of the shipwrecked everywhere in the world, G�ricault had laid the foundations of an aesthetic revolution. The Raft of the Medusa marks the first appearance in painting of ‘the ugly’ and thereby proclaims its scrupulous respect for the truth, however repulsive the truth might be. This concern for truth is integral to the Romantic temperament.

Suggested listening (streaming mp3, 16 minutes):

Franz Liszt: Dante-sonata

When Louis-Philippe created the Mus�e de l’Histoire de France at Versailles, two paintings were commissioned from Delacroix: The Battle of Taillebourg and The Entry of the Crusaders into Constantinople. For these vast canvases, Delacroix was obliged to open a studio, and train his own assistants. This time, the critics were completely won over. The derring-do of Louis IX on his white charger riding down the English defences on the Taillebourg bridge and the famous capture of Constantinople (1204) acted as a balm after the terrible defeat of Waterloo. And yet Delacroix’s method in these paintings is unchanged; again the implications of the event are focused in a single scene, again he shows the catastrophes of war and the women delivered over to the victors. His goal is not to describe the event - though the details are carefully researched and the armour and standards historically correct - but to make the spectator feel its emotional consequences. The inspiration flowing through these ‘grandes machines’ is no less personal and romantic than it was in The Barque of Dante and The Death of Sardanapalus.

Suggested listening (streaming mp3, 12 minutes):

Heinrich Ignaz Franz von Biber: The Battle, suite

Touched by the story of Ophelia’s madness and death, Delacroix contrived to express in her death-scene a Shakespearean tribute to the suffering of humanity.

In the Death of Sardanapalus, inspired by the work of another Romantic, the poet Byron, Delacroix painted an apotheosis of cruelty. The composition, all reds and golds, portrays the holocaust of the legendary Assyrian king, destroying his possessions before committing suicide. The insurgents are attacking his castle; all is lost; stretched out on a sumptuous bed at the summit of an immense pyre, Sardanapalus orders eunuchs and palace officers to cut the throats of his women, his pages, and even his favourite dogs and horses; none of the objects that have served his pleasure are to survive him. His women are placed on a level with his horses and dogs.

The diagonal rhythms, the fluidity of line, the brilliance of the colours and its profound sensuality make The Death of Sardanapalus a masterpiece of 19th-century art. It was exhibited in Paris at the Salon of 1827.

The woman writhing at the foot of the royal bed as a dagger is raised to her throat wears an expression of suffering too voluptuous for contemporary taste.

During his stay in London in 1825, Delacroix is struck by the misery of the city.

For Louis-Philippe’s new historical galleries at Versailles Delacroix painted a characteristically independent, if not actually subversive account of The Entry of the Crusaders into Constantinople. Depicting the climax of the Fourth Crusade, largely a French initiative, this might have been thought a glorious theme, as well as a nod towards that latter-day crusader Napoleon. But the campaign had been fatally tarnished by the pillage it visited upon Constantinople, and Delacroix allows his victors no pleasure in their conquest. Their leader, Baldwin of Flanders, turns away from the vanquished infidel, remorseful or uncertain what to do next, and even his horse stoops as if in sorrow.

In The Entry of the Crusaders into Constantinople, like in The Massacre of Chios, there is a meditation on the misfortunes of war, in both the conquerors on their trembling steeds tower over prostrate women.

This dramatic composition illustrates a scene from Marino Faliero, the historical tragedy by Byron set in 14th-century Venice. It was painted during the time Bonington shared Delacroix’s Paris studio.

Delacroix witnessed this event through the shutters of an upper-storey window, in either Tangier or Meknes. The subject is difficult to understand, and Delacroix offered an explanation in the brochure for the 1838 Salon: “These fanatics are called Issaouis, after their founder Ben Issa. At certain times of year, they meet outside towns; then, their enthusiasm excited by prayers and wild cries, they enter into a veritable state of intoxication, and, spreading through the streets, perform a thousand contortions, and even dangerous acts.”

On the pilasters, Delacroix personified the rivers of France and the seas or oceans that they flow into, such as The Garonne and The Mediterranean.

A spectacular illustration of the enthusiasm aroused amongst the romantic youth by the revolt of the Greeks against the Turks, the Massacre at Chios was directly inspired by the savage Turkish repression of the population of the island of Chios in April 1822. The critics at the Salon of 1824 received this fine painting very unfavourably. Delacroix had been inspired by Constable’s Hay-Wain, which was exhibited at the same Salon, reworking the landscape background with a vibrant touch.

Horrified by the massacres perpetrated in Greece by the Sublime Porte, Delacroix denounced this crime against humanity - this genocide. His denunciation took immediate form in The Massacre of Chios; his gesture parallels that of his fervent admirer, Picasso, in his representation of the massacre at Guernica. Delacroix depicted a landscape racked with fire, stretching desolately behind a group of prisoners awaiting execution. The Massacre is all but a manifesto in its liberated expression of light and atmosphere through colour; after it, 19th century painting could never be the same again.

On the pilasters, Delacroix personified the rivers of France and the seas or oceans that they flow into, such as The Garonne and The Mediterranean.

Delacroix knew that the Native Americans were ‘doomed and must perish’, and that their ultimate destiny was to yield their land to white Christian settlers, and he mourned it. In 1835 he completed this painting (based on Chateaubriand’s story) of a Native American couple fleeing from the massacre of their Natchez tribe, with their little son, new-born by the Mississippi but also doomed to die.

As an exponent of the “purest classicism” who sought to emulate the great masters, Delacroix owed it to himself to be able to paint flowers and landscape, even if the themes that he generally espoused were more ambitious. Like the Impressionists, Delacroix painted at his leisure the endlessly varying spectacle of daylight; skyscapes, setting suns, and the nocturnal scenes inspired by the forest of Senart and the countryside around Champrosay. But it is The Sea from the Heights of Dieppe, that most clearly demonstrates Delacroix’s importance for the Impressionists. Whether or not it was painted in situ, the rapidity of the brush strokes prefigures the rapid notations of the open-air school.

The number of major paintings that derive from Delacroix’s Moroccan notes and sketchbooks is clear proof of the impact of the experience. They include the Jewish Wedding in Morocco, The Fanatics of Tangier and The Sultan of Morocco and his Entourage. In the composition of these works, Delacroix scrupulously observed the notes and sketches that he had made in situ. Thus the decor of the Jewish Wedding in Morocco exactly matches that recorded in a watercolour in the notebook, while his notes give an exact description of the painting that was to come.

The Sultan of Morocco and his Entourage was intended to immortalise the Comte de Mornay’s diplomatic mission, his successful meeting with the Sultan. In fact, Delacroix scorned the opportunity to commemorate an event doomed to oblivion. Instead, he concentrated on creating a spectacular open-air scene in bright light, with vivid colours and monumental protagonists. Exemplifying his orientalising vein, it also exhibits the full wealth of his technical mastery.

The capture of Algiers in 1830 had given France the Sultan of Morocco as a neighbour. Louis Philippe’s government decided to send him an ambassador extraordinary, the Comte de Mornay; the latter wished to take an official artist with him and chose Eugene Delacroix. The mission left Toulon on 11 January 1832, landed at Tangiers on the 25 January, travelled through a part of Morocco, and returned via Oran and Algiers.

During his visit to this country, Delacroix witnessed spectacles belonging to a noble and primitive way of life which provided material for his art until he died; but he had not been allowed to enter the jealously guarded harems of the Moslems. It was the chief harbour engineer at Algiers who persuaded one of the port officials, a former reis or owner of privateers, to allow Delacroix into his own harem.

In these few hours Delacroix did several watercolour sketches, some of which are in the Louvre. Using them as a basis, he painted a large picture on his return, and exhibited it in the 1834 salon. He wanted to show the dark tones of flesh and the subdued colours in the warm half-light of the harem.

In 1849 he painted another smaller version of the same subject, now in the Mus�e de Montpellier. Here the colours are softer and the atmosphere more intimate; it has a note of nostalgia absent from the 1834 Salon picture, which is still full of his first impressions, and which already foreshadows Renoir. The latter artist was well aware of this relationship; in 1872 he painted a large picture inspired by Delacroix’s canvas and called Les Parisiennes habill�es en Alg�riennes (Tokyo Museum). He had already done an Odalisque and exhibited it in the 1870 Salon. (Chester Dale Collection, New York.)

Suggested listening (streaming mp3, 8 minutes):

Gioacchino Rossini: L’Italiana in Algeri, overture

The Women of Algiers is a composition remote from the tumult and tragedy of The Death of Sardanapalus. The serenity and silence of the painting are striking. The veiled light and rhythmic forms impart a strong sense of unity.