Eugène Delacroix

1798 - 1863 • French • Painter • Romantic Baroque

"0 young artist, you search for a subject-everything is a subject. Your subject is yourself, your impressions, your emotions in the presence of nature." - Eugène Delacroix

With contemporaries Victor Hugo and Hector Berlioz, Delacroix completed the trinity of late-18th- and early-19thcentury Romantics preeminent in French literature, music, and art. Delacroix had modeled for GERICAULT's Raft of the Medusa, and his own paintings similarly presented contemporary events with great drama on very large canvases-characteristics of ROMANTICISM. Delacroix wanted to thrill, to move, to motivate his viewers in the new French Republic. Himself an eyewitness to the popular July 1830 uprisings in Paris that reignited the spirit of revolution, Delacroix was excited by the battle for individual freedom-individualism was an important tenet of Romanticism. Delacroix's Liberty Leading the People (1830) became an archetype for the image of idealistic and heroic revolution. The figure of Liberty is a bare-breasted woman forging ahead, holding the Tricolor above her head as both emblem and weapon. Her dress billows as if she had created a wind by the force of her movement, bringing to mind the great HELLENISTIC marble NIKE OF SAMOTHRACE (c. 190 BCE). But Delacroix's Liberty strides among fallen bodies with the smoke of burning Paris behind her. The picture combines journalistic reporting and mythic allegory. Delacroix used dramatic lighting, a rich PALETTE, and sweeping-and sometimes splashing brushstrokes. In many of his pictures Delacroix applied paint with energy appropriate to their violence. He was fiercely anti-CLASSICAL, and his battle with INGRES became a cause celebre. A standard comparison of their styles contrasts pictures that both artists made of Paganini: In Ingres's NEOCLASSICAL pencil drawing of 1819, Paganini is rendered in a formal manner with crisp, descriptive lines and elegant shading; cropped at the hips, he is not playing his violin, which is tucked beneath his arm, but he is composed, sophisticated, idealized. Delacroix's oil painting of c 8 3 2 shows Paganini playing his violin, his entire body curving as if with the resonance of his music. There are none of the careful specifics and objective details of Ingres; for Delacroix, art is subjective and intuitive. In 1831 Delacroix accompanied a French diplomatic mission to Morocco. A few paintings, such as Women of Algiers (1834) and Jewish Wedding in Morocco ( 1837/ 41 ), resulted from his trip, but the seven note/sketchbooks and some WATERCOLORS he brought home have greater spontaneity and enormous appeal. Influenced by the work of RUBENS and Gericault, Delacroix himself influenced numerous artists, including RENOIR and van GOGH. In his eulogy at the artist's death, BAUDELAIRE wrote, "What is this mysterious je ne sais quoi which Delacroix, to the glory of our century, has translated better than any other artist? It is the indivisible, the impalpable; it is the dream, the nerves, the soul. And he has done this ... with no other means save contour and color."