Delacroix

Eugène Delacroix (1798-1863) was a leading figure of the Romantic school whose works represent the antithesis of the cool academic perfection of Ingres. Delacroix is noted for his energetic use of color and passionate, emotional canvases.
 
A highly literary man who initially debated between a career as an author or a painter, Delacroix turned frequently to subjects from "modern" fiction, including Shakespeare (Hamlet And His Mother), Chateaubriand (The Natchez, representing a scene from Atala) and Walter Scott (The Abduction of Rebecca, taken from Ivanhoe). Eschewing the Neoclassical interest in ancient Greek and Roman subjects and historical events, the Romantics insisted that art should reflect modern European history and literature, which was considered anything from the Middle Ages to the present day in England, France and Italy. Delacroix's Romantic literary canvases frequently focus on scenes that emphasize either the exotic nature of the subject, as seen in the Native American couple holding their baby in Les Natchez, or passionate danger, as in The Abduction and Christ in a Tempest. With a vibrant palette of reds and greens, open brushwork and swirling vortices that draw the viewer into the action of the scene, Delacroix was a quintessential Romantic. The famous Romantic ,i.fraternité des arts was played out in Delacroix's close friendships with many contemporary painters and authors, including George Sand. George Sand's Garden at Nohant stands as tribute to his time spent in the countryside with the idealist author and her friends Musset, Chopin, Liszt and Marie d'Agoult.
 
Like Géricault, Delacroix sometimes chose contemporary political themes, and his depiction of the Massacres at Chios (1824) depicts a tragic scene from the Greek War for Independence (from Turkish rule) that had become a favorite cause for liberal Romantics both in France and in England. He selects the moment of anti-climax, after the defeat, as the survivors are waiting for death or enslavement. Massacres at Chios is a painting of intense suffering and misery in the absence of any aspect of the heroic or redemptive. Baudelaire called this painting "a terrifying hymn in honor of doom and irremediable suffering." Six years later, Delacroix painted the iconic Liberty Leading the People commemorating the Revolution of 1830. Here, Marianne in the guise of a robust peasant woman rises above the barricades; her semi-nudity denotes an allegorical status as a representation of France itself, while her bare feet and gun refer to the real working-class women who participated in the Revolution that ended the Bourbon Restoration. Delacroix's unidealized canvas depicts a full range of Parisian classes side by side, both living and dead. In contrast to Ingres's calm, Neoclassical images, Delacroix's Liberty Leading the People expresses the chaos and agitation of political and aesthetic revolution.
 
Like Ingres and his generation of Romantics, Delacroix was fascinated with the exotic, and Death of Sardanapalous (1827), based on a play by Byron, epitomizes his vision of passionate violence. The scene depicts the suicide of a defeated Assyrian king who destroys everything he owns - slaves, animals, his palace, himself - before surrendering to the enemy. The ensuing orgy of destruction is portrayed in a chaotic tangle of color and form that is almost impossible to decipher. Yet the overall impression is one of melancholy, communicated by the painting's vortex-like structure that draws the viewer into the disturbing scene. The cruel indifference of the pasha watching the horrible massacre so at odds with the frantic action of the scene before him, has lead to frequent comparisons between this painting and Baudelaire's "Spleen" poem in Les Fleurs du mal, "Je suis comme le roi d'un pays pluvieux..."
 
An 1832 trip to northern Africa further inspired Delacroix's Romantic Orientalism, fueled by his interest in the play of light and color. Les Femmes dÕAlger dans leur appartement (1834) provides an interesting counterpoint to Ingres's exoticism. While focusing on the female form in the private space of the Arab interior, Delacroix takes the erotic implications in new directions, far more interested in the plays of color and pattern than flesh. Although a European male would not have had access to Algerian womenÕs chambers, Delacroix nonetheless creates a quasi-documentary scene that aims to be more real than ideal while at the same time investing much of the painting's significance in the vibration of color and undulating form.
 
Delacroix was Baudelaire's painter of choice, and the poet desribed the Romantic artist as the embodiment of "le rêve, les nerfs, l'âme" of the nineteenth century. He saw in Delacroix's painting an art of suggestion addressing the viewer's memory and imagination, where color is an abstract language that can signify outside of strict representation. In L'Oeuvre et la vie d'Eugène Delacroix (1863) Baudelaire observed "La ligne et la couleur font penser et rêver toutes les deux; les plaisirs qui en dérivent sont d'une nature différente, mais parfaitement égale et absolument indépendante du sujet du tableau. Un tableau de Delacroix, placé à une trop grande distance pour que vous puissiez juger de l'agrément des contours ou de la qualité plus ou moins dramatique du sujet, vous pénètre déjà d'une volupté surnaturelle. Il vous semble qu'une atmosphère magique a marché vers vous et vous enveloppe." Thus he validates an abstract meaning for color, removed from representation, in Delacroix's canvases.
 
In a second important passage, the poet of Les Fleurs du mal described Delacroix's compositional strategy. Rather than strictly imitating nature, he instead maintained, "La nature n'est qu'un dictionnaire... Pour bien comprendre l'étendue du sens impliqué dans cette phrase, il faut se figurer les usages ordinaires et nombreux du dictionnaire. On y cherche le sens des mots, la génération des mots, l'étymologie des mots; enfin on en extrait tous les éléments qui composent une phrase ou un récit; mais personne n'a jamais considéré le dictionnaire comme une composition, dans le sens poétique du mot. Les peintres qui obéissent à l'imagination cherchent dans leur dictionnaire les éléments qui s'accommodent à leur conception; encore en les ajustant avec un certain art, leur donnent-ils un physionomie toute nouvelle. Ceux qui n'ont pas d'imagination copient le dictionnaire. Il en résulte un très grand vice, le vice de la banalité."
 
Delacroix's influence on the next generation of painters, and on the Impressionists, was enormous. See Fantin-Latour's Hommage à Delacroix.