Ferdinand Victor
Eugène Delacroix {duh-lah-kwah'}, b. Apr. 26, 1798, d. Aug. 13, 1863, was the leading
exponent of romantic painting in France (see romanticism).
In 1815 he entered the studio of the neoclassical painter Pierre Narcisse Guérin, where
he met Théodore Géricault, a romantic painter by whom he was much influenced.
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"Femme au perroquet"
by Eugène Delacroix
Musée des Beaux-Arts, Lyon
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At the 1824 Salon he admired John Constable's English landscapes, which reintroduced into France
the baroque coloristic tradition that the neoclassical painters had earlier discarded.
Characteristic of Delacroix's pictures is
unresolved tension and a romantic obsession with human mortality. Greece Dying on the Ruins of
Missolonghi (1827; Musée des Beaux-Arts, Bordeaux), for example, commemorated the defeat
of the Greek nationalists gathered there around Lord Byron in the early 1820s. Delacroix saw in
the Greek struggle for independence against the Turks an affirmation of the ideal of liberty. In
the painting, Greece is personified as a young woman with supplicating gesture. The blood-spattered
ruins on which she stands indicate defeat, and the greenish tint on the woman's breast, suggesting
imminent death, symbolizes the defeat of a noble cause.
The painting in many respects prefigures Liberty Leading the People (1830), in which the
heroine is now the triumphant figure of liberty.
In 1832, Delacroix accompanied a French embassy
to the sultan of Morocco. While at Tangiers he filled notebooks with drawings of local details,
amassing facts for the paintings with Oriental subjects he would introduce into French art. Yet
his Oriental pictures are never mere descriptions of local customs, for Delacroix always insisted
that imagination was the essential gift of the painter. In Lion Hunt (1861; Art Institute of
Chicago), a Rubenesque picture filled with men, horses, and wild animals, such details as turbans
and wild, non-European expressions are fused by the unreal color into an imaginative vision.
Literature was another powerful stimulus to
Delacroix's imagination. The theme of Hamlet especially appealed to him because Shakespeare's hero
was also tortured by the uncertainty of existence. In Hamlet and Horatio in the Graveyard
(1859; Louvre, Paris) the figures appear amid reminders of human death. The ground slopes away under
a sky filled with blood-red clouds. Painted with tenuous brushstrokes, the figures' surroundings
seem to share their restlessness, and a fantasylike atmosphere pervades the scene.
Delacroix's career was studded with honors. He
was awarded (1831) the medal of the Legion of Honor and was commissioned to decorate the Library
of the Senate in the Luxembourg Palace and the Library of the Chamber of Deputies in the Bourbon
Palace (both completed 1847). He was elected to the Institut de France in 1857.
Joan Siegfried
Source: The Grolier Multimedia Encyclopedia, Release #9.01, ©1997
Bibliography: Athanassoglou-Kallmyer, Nina M., Eugène Delacroix (1991); Charles
Baudelaire, Eugène Delacroix, trans. by J. M. Bernstein (1947); Eugène Delacroix,
Journal, trans. by L. Norton (1980); Delteil, Loys, Delacroix: The Graphic Work (1994);
Huyghe, Rene, Delacroix, trans. by J. Griffin (1963); Johnson, Lee, Delacroix (1963) and,
as ed., The Painting of Eugene Delacroix, 6 vols. (1981-89); Pool, Phoebe, Delacroix (1969);
Trapp, Frank, Delacroix and the Romantic Image (1988).
Images: "Femme au perroquet" (Woman with a Parrot), 1827, oil on canvas
(Musée des Beaux-Arts, Lyon); "Liberty Leading the People", 1830, oil on canvas
(Musée du Louvre, Paris).
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