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Art.com - the Supergallery for Art Prints and Framing
PLEASE VISIT OUR ART BOUTIQUE TO PURCHASE DELACROIX PRINTS


EUGENE DELACROIX

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.

Femme au perroquet

"Femme au perroquet"
by Eugène Delacroix
Musée des Beaux-Arts, Lyon

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.

Paul en Arlequin

"Liberty Leading the People"
by Eugène Delacroix
Musée du Louvre, Paris

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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).
Copyrights Notice and Disclaimer: Images of artists' works displayed throughout this site have been obtained from numerous sources, including digital libraries at educational institutions, educational software, and Mark Harden's Artchive. Credit is attributed when known. Some works are considered to be in the public domain, based on current U.S. and international copyright acts. For more information on copyright laws, please refer to the Artists Rights Society and Benedict O'Mahoney's The Copyright Web Site. [See also: DiscoverFrance.net Copyrights.]

Delacroix Links:

Catholic Encyclopedia
Henry Anger explores the life forces which led Delacroix into artistic pursuits, and discusses the diversity of his prolific body of work -- which is estimated to number some 9140 subjects.

CGFA - Virtual Art Museum
Carol L. Gerten maintains an impressive image library of meticulously scanned works from hundreds of renowned artists, including this collection featuring 15 of Delacroix' paintings.

Liberty Leading the People
Univ. of Conn. English professor, Lee A. Jacobus, discusses the significance of allegory in Delacroix' romantic painting, which celebrates the revolution of July 28, 1830. [excerpt from Humanities: The Evolution of Values by Lee A. Jacobus, 1986, McGraw Hill.]

Smithsonian Magazine
"From Saints to Sunsets: The Late Great Works of Delacroix" (article in the September 1998 issue) explores Delacroix exhibits across America.

Street in Meknes,1832
As the first Frenchman to be permitted inside the walls of Meknes -- which at that time was the capital city of Morocco, in northern Africa -- Delacroix took the opportunity to depict the images of an exotic, unknown culture to the folks back home. This expressive piece resides in the permanent collection at The Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY.

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Delacroix Quotations:

"What makes men of genius, or rather, what they make, is not new ideas, it is that idea -- possessing them -- that what has been said has still not been said enough." (1)

Source of Quotation: (1) QuoteWorld.org.

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