Ferdinand Victor Eugène Delacroix

The French painter Ferdinand Victor Eugène Delacroix (1798-1863) repudiated the neoclassic manner and developed a freer and more romantic style with a particular emphasis on color.

For 40 years Eugène Delacroix was one of the most prominent and controversial painters in France. Although the intense emotional expressiveness of his work placed the artist squarely in the midst of the general romantic outpouring of European art, he always remained an individual phenomenon and did not create a school. As a personality and as a painter, he was admired by the impressionists, postimpressionists, and symbolists who came after him.

Born on April 28, 1798, at Charenton-Saint-Maurice, the son of an important public official, Delacroix grew up in comfortable upper-middle-class circumstances in spite of the troubled times. He received a good classical education at the Lycée Impérial. He entered the studio of Pierre Narcisse Guérin in 1815, where he met Théodore Géricault.

Early Style

Delacroix's public career was launched with a flourish at the Salon of 1822, in which he exhibited Dante and Virgil in Hell. Large, somewhat hastily painted, still traditional in its bas-relief type of design, it was nevertheless novel in subject matter and in the emotional intensity conveyed by powerful, contorted forms and smoldering, vibrant tones.

Delacroix shared the new Anglophilia of French culture, played the role of a dandy, read Shakespeare, Byron, and Scott, visited England, and was impressed by English artists such as Richard Bonington and John Constable. Indeed, Constable's landscapes are supposed to have influenced Delacroix's Massacre at Chios, shown in 1824. An immense canvas, almost 14 feet high, it was obviously designed to create an impression at the Salon. Although Baron Gros called it "the massacre of painting," the government purchased it. Based on an incident in the Greek war of independence, the painting is as exotic as Delacroix's later North African pictures and is filled with a romantic taste for violence.

Among the dozen paintings Delacroix submitted to the Salon of 1827-1828, the immense, baroque Death of Sardanapalus, based on a theme by Byron, is remarkable for its theatrical fervor and luxuriant color. Liberty Leading the People, inspired by the Revolution of 1830, closed the first phase of Delacroix's career. It is almost the only important work, except for the Massacre at Chios, that had any connection with contemporary history: the scene was Parisian but the interpretation was allegorical.

Mature Style

The stimulus of a fortuitous 6-month trip to Morocco in 1832 had a lifelong effect on Delacroix's development and gave him an inexhaustible store of pictorial materials. The most immediate result was Women of Algiers in Their Apartment ( 1834), in which an Oriental subject allowed for the kind of "visual feast" and poetic effect that he always considered the proper aims of painting.

Also notable among the pictures of the 1830s and 1840s by Delacroix were historical scenes painted on commission, such as the Battle of Taillebourg (1837) and the Entry of the Crusaders into Constantinople (1840). They reflect his natural taste for the grand manner and for large-scale compositions, as well as his persistent enthusiasm for the dynamic style of Peter Paul Rubens and the mundane splendor of Paolo Veronese.

Those who believe that Delacroix turned back to classicism in the 1830s could point to his painting Medea (1838), a picture that could almost have been painted by Jacques Louis David. "I am a pure classic," Delacroix insisted at this time, only to confess in a paradoxical counter-statement, "If by romanticism they mean the free manifestation of my personal impressions … then I am a romantic and have been one since I was fifteen."

In 1833 Delacroix began his career as a mural painter, and in the next 28 years he executed paintings in Paris in the Chamber of Deputies (Palais-Bourbon), the Senate (Luxembourg Palace), the church of St-Denis-du-St-Sacrement, the Louvre, the City Hall, and St-Sulpice. Drawing heavily on classical and biblical themes and aided by assistants, he employed a technique in which the colors were mixed with wax. Although many of the subjects were traditional, the style in which they were carried out was full of romantic fire and excitement (Attila Hemicycle, finished 1847, Palais-Bourbon). In the ceiling panel of the Louvre, the Triumph of Apollo (1851), Delacroix achieved a highly successful baroque manner of his own. The murals are among the finest French decorative paintings.

Late Style

In the 1850s Delacroix's natural tendency toward freedom in the treatment of form and looseness of touch became more marked: Marphise (1852) and the sketch for Eurydice (1856) are good examples. Such works are reminiscent of the boldness of the late Titian—and of the late Auguste Renoir. Brilliance and luminosity of color increase; all forms are fused together in a dense pictorial whole.

There is an appreciable increase in Christian themes in the final period of Delacroix's career. "I was much impressed by the Requiem Mass," he wrote in his Journal (Nov. 2, 1854). "I thought of all that religion has to offer the imagination, and at the same time of its appeal to man's deepest feelings." The Christ on the Lake of Genesareth (1854) in Baltimore illustrates the rough-textured, agitated, and tumultuous style that often appeared in his final years of painting. This theme, which seems to have had a broad symbolic significance for the artist, must have become truly obsessive, for there are seven different versions of it.

In the last 10 or 12 years of his life Delacroix showed a renewed interest in the "pagan" North African subjects of his Moroccan experience of 1832. Among the most striking are the tiger and lion hunts and scenes of animal violence, which were created as much from imagination and from Rubens as from direct observation of animal behavior in Africa or Paris. Perhaps the sketch Lion Hunt (1854), done in preparation for a large painting in Bordeaux, is the most astonishing of these works. The wild, explosive design, created by fluid patches of warm color, has very properly been considered an anticipation of Fauvism.

Charles Baudelaire's enthusiastic praise of Delacroix's contribution to the Salon of 1859 was not enough to outweigh the bitter criticism. In any case, the painter decided not to exhibit at the Salon again. In 1861, disappointed by the poor response to his new mural paintings in St-Sulpice (Jacob Wrestling with the Angel), Delacroix wrote that he did not see much point in continuing with work that interested only 30 people in Paris. And yet, if he had been offered other commissions and had had the strength to do them, he would have gone on. By that time artistic work had become his only passion, his only solace. Two years later failing health overcame his determined will, and Delacroix died in Paris on Aug. 13, 1863.

Delacroix's Influence

In the early years of his career Delacroix found black a valuable "color." Later he said, "Gray is the enemy of all paintings"; and finally he wrote, "Banish all earth colors." Although he does not seem to have used a fully spectral palette, he moved in that direction, exploited complementary contrasts, and demonstrated the usefulness of separate touches and the possibility of constructing a picture by means of individual, interlacing brush-strokes and patches of color. These devices were developed further by the impressionists and postimpressionists. On the other hand, the symbolists followed Delacroix in the pictorial projection of inner, imaginative fantasies and in the abstractly expressive use of color.

Further Reading

Delacroix's Journal was translated by Walter Pach in 1937. Lucy Norton did another translation of the greater part of the Journal in 1951. The most comprehensive study of Delacroix is René Huyghe, Delacroix (trans. 1963). The best short account is Lee Johnson, Delacroix (1963). Independent in outlook, and with many unfamiliar comparative illustrations, is Frank A. Trapp, The Attainment of Delacroix (1970). Two excellent but more specialized books are George P. Mras, Eugène Delacroix's Theory of Art (1966), and Jack J. Spector, The Murals of Eugène Delacroix at Saint-Sulpice (1967). □

Delacroix, Eugène (b Charenton-Saint-Maurice, nr. Paris, 26 Apr. 1798; d Paris, 13 Aug. 1863). French painter, draughtsman, and lithographer. He was one of the towering figures of the Romantic movement and one of the last major artists to devote a large part of his career to mural painting in the heroic tradition. Lorenz Eitner (An Outline of 19th Century European Painting, 1987) describes him as ‘the last great European painter to use the repertory of humanistic art with conviction and originality. In his hands, antique myth and medieval history, Golgotha and the Barricade, Faust and Hamlet, Scott and Byron, tiger and Odalisque yielded images of equal power.’ He was the son of a diplomat, Charles Delacroix, who at the time of his son's birth was ambassador in The Hague, but it has been suggested that his natural father was the great statesman Talleyrand, a friend of the family. His mother, Victoire Oeben, was the daughter of Jean-François Oeben, one of the most distinguished furniture makers of his day.

Delacroix had a good education and grew up with a love of literature and music as well as art. In 1815 he began studying with Pierre Guérin, who had earlier taught Géricault (whose work greatly influenced Delacroix), and the following year he enrolled at the École des Beaux-Arts. His real artistic education, however, was gained by copying Old Masters in the Louvre, where he delighted particularly in Rubens and the 16th-century Venetian painters. Throughout his life he remained a keen and perceptive student of his predecessors, and Rubens—with his richness of imagination, warmth of colour, and enormous energy—was a constant source of inspiration. In 1822 his career was brilliantly launched when his first submission to the Salon, the Barque of Dante (Louvre, Paris), a melodramatic scene from Dante's Inferno, was the talking point of the exhibition and was bought by the state. Two years later he had another success at the Salon with the Massacre at Chios (Louvre), inspired by a Turkish atrocity in the recent Greek War of Independence. It aroused much hostile criticism (Gros, who had admired the Barque of Dante, called it ‘the massacre of painting’), but it was awarded a gold medal and once again was bought by the state (with Talleyrand perhaps pulling strings in the background).

The success of the Massacre at Chios funded a trip to England in May–August 1825 (Delacroix had earlier met Bonington and admired Constable's Hay Wain, which had been exhibited to great acclaim in the 1824 Salon). After this visit, English literature became an important source of inspiration in his work for several years; his next major Salon success, for example, the violent and erotic Death of Sardanapalus (1827, Louvre), was based on a play by Byron. He was also influenced by contemporary English painting; his portrait of his friend Louis-Auguste Schwiter (1826–30, NG, London) is almost like an act of homage to Lawrence, of whom he had a high opinion personally as well as professionally. Another major source of imagery in Delacroix's work came from North Africa. In 1832 he visited Spain, Morocco, and Algeria in the entourage of the Comte de Mornay (who headed a diplomatic mission to the Sultan of Morocco), and acquired a rich fund of exotic visual imagery that he exploited for the rest of his life, lion hunting becoming one of his favourite themes (Lion Hunt, 1861, Art Inst. of Chicago). In spite of his love of such quintessentially Romantic subjects and his open enmity with Ingres, who was upheld as the great champion of the classical tradition, Delacroix always regarded himself as part of this tradition, and for his large works he followed the time-honoured course of making numerous preparatory drawings. Although his work often gives the feeling of great spontaneity, he thought deeply about all aspects of his art and craft.

In 1833 Delacroix received a commission to decorate the Salon du Roi in the Palais Bourbon (now the Assemblée Nationale), Paris, and from this point much of his career was devoted to large-scale wall and ceiling painting. He finished the work in the Salon du Roi in 1837 and followed this with decorations in the library of the same building (1838–47). His other major decorative schemes (all in Paris) include those in the Library of the Luxembourg Palace (1841–6), the Galerie d'Apollon in the Louvre (1850), and the Chapelle des Anges of the church of St Sulpice (1853–61), with its celebrated scenes of Jacob and the Angel and Heliodorus Expelled from the Temple. All these works are in oils (he only once experimented with fresco). In addition to these huge public undertakings, he continued to produce a wide range of smaller paintings, and he also made lithographs, the best known of which are his illustrations to Goethe's Faust (1828) and Shakespeare's Hamlet (1843).

Delacroix was awarded many honours for his work, and his charm, intelligence, and dashing looks meant that he was in demand by fashionable society. However, he was fairly solitary by nature (he never married) and had only a few close friends, including another archetypal Romantic genius, Chopin, of whom he painted a portrait (1838, Louvre) and whom he described as ‘the truest artist I have ever met’ (he had a piano installed in his studio so the great man could play there). Although he carefully trained the assistants he used on his decorative commissions, he otherwise had few pupils, and none of them attained any independent distinction. Nevertheless, he had enormous influence on a wide range of artists, particularly through his vibrant and uninhibited use of colour. He was ‘the supreme colourist of the first half of the nineteenth century’ ( Lee Johnson, Delacroix, 1963), and the artists who were most clearly influenced by this aspect of his work include Monet, Renoir, and Seurat. Among those who copied his work and valued its liberating effect on the imagination were Cézanne, Degas, van Gogh, and Redon, and among the professed admirers depicted in Fantin-Latour's Homage to Delacroix (1864, Mus. d'Orsay, Paris) are Baudelaire, Manet, and Whistler.

Delacroix's output was enormous. After his death his executors found more than 9,000 separate works in his studio, including several hundred paintings and more than 6,000 drawings. He drew every day, like a musician practising scales, and he prided himself on the speed at which he worked, declaring ‘If you are not skilful enough to sketch a man falling out of a window during the time it takes him to get from the fifth storey to the ground, then you will never be able to produce monumental work.’ Delacroix also left behind a substantial literary legacy, for few other great painters have written so copiously or so interestingly about art. He was a voluminous letter-writer and kept a journal from 1822 to 1824 and again from 1847 until his death—a wonderfully rich source of information and opinion on his life and times. His studio in Paris is now a museum devoted to his life and work, but the Louvre has the finest collection of his paintings.

Delacroix, Eugène (1798–1863). French painter, draughtsman, and lithographer. He was one of the towering figures of the Romantic movement and one of the last major artists to devote a large part of his career to mural painting in the heroic tradition. Lorenz Eitner (An Outline of 19th Century European Painting, 1987) describes him as ‘the last great European painter to use the repertory of humanistic art with conviction and originality. In his hands, antique myth and medieval history, Golgotha and the Barricade, Faust and Hamlet, Scott and Byron, tiger and Odalisque yielded images of equal power.’ He was the son of a diplomat, Charles Delacroix, who at the time of his son's birth was ambassador in The Hague, but it has been suggested that his natural father was the great statesman Talleyrand, a friend of the family. His mother, Victoire Oeben, was the daughter of Jean-François Oeben, one of the most distinguished furniture makers of his day. Delacroix had a good education and grew up with a love of literature and music as well as art. In 1815 he began studying with Pierre-Narcisse Guérin, who had earlier taught Géricault (whose work greatly influenced Delacroix), and the following year he enrolled at the École des Beaux-Arts. His real artistic education, however, was gained by copying Old Masters in the Louvre, where he delighted particularly in Rubens and the 16th-century Venetian painters. Throughout his life he remained a keen and perceptive student of his predecessors, and Rubens—with his richness of imagination, warmth of colour, and enormous energy—was a constant source of inspiration. In 1822 his career was brilliantly launched when his first submission to the Salon, the Barque of Dante (Louvre, Paris), a melodramatic scene from Dante's Inferno, was the talking point of the exhibition and was bought by the state. Two years later he had another success at the Salon with the Massacre at Chios (Louvre), inspired by a Turkish atrocity in the recent Greek War of Independence. It aroused much hostile criticism (Gros, who had admired the Barque of Dante, called it ‘the massacre of painting’), but it was awarded a gold medal and once again was bought by the state (with Talleyrand perhaps pulling strings in the background).

The success of the Massacre at Chios funded a trip to England in May–August 1825 ( Delacroix had earlier met Bonington and admired Constable's Hay Wain, which had been exhibited to great acclaim in the 1824 Salon). After this visit, English literature became an important source of inspiration in his work for several years; his next major Salon success, for example, the violent and erotic Death of Sardanapalus (1827, Louvre), was based on a play by Byron. He was also influenced by contemporary English painting; his portrait of his friend Louis-Auguste Schwiter (1826–30, NG, London) is almost like an act of homage to Lawrence, of whom he had a high opinion personally as well as professionally. Another major source of imagery in Delacroix's work came from North Africa. In 1832 he visited Spain, Morocco, and Algeria in the entourage of the Comte de Mornay (who headed a diplomatic mission to the Sultan of Morocco), and acquired a rich fund of exotic visual imagery that he exploited for the rest of his life, lion hunting becoming one of his favourite themes (Lion Hunt, 1861, Art Inst. of Chicago). In spite of his love of such quintessentially Romantic subjects and his open enmity with Ingres, who was upheld as the great champion of the classical tradition, Delacroix always regarded himself as part of this tradition, and for his large works he followed the time-honoured course of making numerous preparatory drawings. Although his work often gives the feeling of great spontaneity, he thought deeply about all aspects of his art and craft.

In 1833 Delacroix received a commission to decorate the Salon du Roi in the Palais Bourbon (now the Assemblée Nationale), Paris, and from this point much of his career was devoted to large-scale wall and ceiling painting. He finished the work in the Salon du Roi in 1837 and followed this with decorations in the library of the same building (1838–47). His other major decorative schemes (all in Paris) include those in the Library of the Luxembourg Palace (1841–6), the Galerie d'Apollon in the Louvre (1850), and the Chapelle des Anges of the church of St Sulpice (1853–61), with its celebrated scenes of Jacob and the Angel and Heliodorus Expelled from the Temple. All these works are in oils (he only once experimented with fresco). In addition to these huge public undertakings, Delacroix continued to produce a wide range of smaller paintings, and he also made lithographs, the best known of which are his illustrations to Goethe's Faust (1828) and Shakespeare's Hamlet (1843). He was awarded many honours for his work, and his charm, intelligence, and dashing looks meant that he was in demand by fashionable society. However, he was fairly solitary by nature (he never married) and had only a few close friends, including another archetypal Romantic genius, Chopin, of whom he painted a portrait (1838, Louvre) and whom he described as ‘the truest artist I have ever met’ (he had a piano installed in his studio so the great man could play there). Although he carefully trained the assistants he used on his decorative commissions, he otherwise had few pupils, and none of them attained any independent distinction. Nevertheless, he had enormous influence on a wide range of artists, particularly through his vibrant and uninhibited use of colour. He was ‘the supreme colourist of the first half of the nineteenth century’ ( Lee Johnson, Delacroix, 1963), and the artists who were most clearly influenced by this aspect of his work include Monet, Renoir, and Seurat. Among those who copied his work and valued its liberating effect on the imagination were Cézanne, Degas, van Gogh, and Redon, and among the professed admirers depicted in Fantin-Latour's Homage to Delacroix (1864, Mus. d'Orsay, Paris) are Baudelaire, Manet, and Whistler.

Delacroix's output was enormous. After his death his executors found more than 9,000 separate works in his studio, including several hundred paintings and more than 6,000 drawings. He drew every day, like a musician practising scales, and he prided himself on the speed at which he worked, declaring ‘If you are not skilful enough to sketch a man falling out of a window during the time it takes him to get from the fifth storey to the ground, then you will never be able to produce monumental work.’ Delacroix also left behind a substantial literary legacy, for few other great painters have written so copiously or so interestingly about art. He was a voluminous letter writer and kept a journal from 1822 to 1824 and again from 1847 until his death—a wonderfully rich source of information and opinion on his life and times. His studio in Paris is now a museum devoted to his life and work, but the Louvre has the finest collection of his paintings.

Eugène Delacroix (Ferdinand-Victor-Eugène Delacroix) , 1798-1863, French painter. Delacroix is considered the foremost painter of the romantic movement in France; his influence as a colorist is inestimably great.

He studied in Guérin 's studio with Géricault , who became a major influence on his work. Delacroix enriched his neoclassical training with acute attention to the works of Rubens, Michelangelo, Veronese, and the Venetian school, and later Constable, Bonington, and the English watercolorists. When his first major work, The Bark of Dante (Louvre), had been exhibited in the Salon in 1822 and purchased by the government, he was, to his own surprise, recognized as the leader of the opposition to the neoclassical school of David . In temperament and choice of subjects he was a romantic, as revealed by his dramatic interpretation of scenes from mythology, literature, and political, religious, and literary history.

In 1824 Delacroix painted much of his Massacre at Chios (Louvre). The violence of the subject matter and ravishing color of this work and of The Death of Sardanapalus (1827; Louvre) were heavily condemned by some critics. In England in 1825 he spent several months absorbing English painting and making numerous studies of horses. As a tribute to Byron and the Greek War of Independence he painted Greece Expiring on the Ruins of Missolonghi (1827; Bordeaux).

The four months Delacroix spent in Morocco in 1832 provided him with visual material that he drew upon for the rest of his life. There he filled seven fat notebooks with brilliant watercolor sketches and notes. His continuing fascination with the exotic was revealed by Women of Algiers (1834; Louvre) and The Jewish Wedding (1839; Louvre). His powerful Entrance of the Crusaders into Constantinople (1841; Louvre) is a compelling, epic work of history painting.

Delacroix's other major sources were the works and lives of major literary figures. In 1820 he made 17 bizarre and exciting lithographs for Goethe's Faust. He used Shakespeare often in several media (e.g., Hamlet and Horatio in the Graveyard, 1839; Louvre). He was also inspired by turbulent scenes from the plays and poems of Byron (e.g., Combat of the Giaour and the Pasha, 1827; Art Inst. of Chicago), from the novels of Scott, and from a number of other literary works. He also created many strong paintings on religious themes.

Delacroix's Self-Portrait (1835-37; Louvre) reveals a thin, dynamic, yet reserved countenance. He also portrayed many notable contemporaries, including Paganini (1832; Phillips Coll., Washington, D.C.) and, in 1838, his close friends Chopin (Louvre) and George Sand (Copenhagen). Of his animals in motion, the watercolor Tiger Attacking a Horse (1825-28; Louvre) and The Lion Hunt (1861; Art Inst. of Chicago) are characteristic. During the last three decades of his life he secured numerous public commissions. His decorations in the Palais Bourbon (1833-47; Paris), the Palais de Luxembourg (1841-46), and the Church of Saint-Sulpice (1853-61) are examples of his genius as a muralist. His work is best represented in the Louvre.

Bibliography: Delacroix's enormous involvement in contemporary artistic and intellectual life is recorded in his journal, kept from 1823 to 1854 (tr. by W. Pach, 1937, repr. 1972; selections tr., 1980, 1995).

Delacroix, (Ferdinand Victor) Eugène (1798–1863) French painter, the greatest French artist of Romanticism. Success came at his first Paris salon (1822), when he sold The Barque of Dante and, two years later, The Massacre at Chios. A visit to Morocco (1832) inspired a rich collection of sketches. His work underwent a major change in the 1830s, when he began to exploit divisionism (placing complementary colours side by side to obtain greater vibrancy). He was one of France's best monumental history painters and influenced many late 19th-century progressive artists, especially Van Gogh.

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