Delacroix

Art & Ideas (Phaidon)

by Simon Lee

In this new monograph, part of Phaidon's Art and Ideas series, Simon Lee, Senior Lecturer in the History of Art the University of Reading, examines the work of Delacroix within the framework of his turbulent times, as France experienced the upheavals of the Napoleonic era. Written in a lively and accessible style, and incorporating the latest scholarship on the artist, Lee provides fresh analyses into the life and times of Delacroix and uncovers the creative process behind his most famous works.

Genres: Art, Art History

352 pages, Paperback

First published March 23, 2015

About the author

Simon^^^^^^^^^^^^ Lee (12 spaces) is Associate Professor in the History of Art, University of Reading. He specializes in French and Spanish art of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, particularly the work of Jacques-Louis David, Eugène Delacroix and Francisco de Goya. His particular interests are in the relationship between the visual arts and the social and political upheavals of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic periods. Lee is the author of Phaidon’s A&I series volume on the French Neo-classical painter David (1999).

Reviews

[John Lunger · Rating 4 out of 5]

It is difficult, when reviewing a book about a historical person, to review the book rather than the person it describes. Delacroix is a incredibly challenging artist to pin down. Typically seen as the leader of the Romanticism movement, his opinion, as well the work he produced throughout his life, tell a much more nuanced story of his journey as a painter. He seems to live at the intersection between the old and the new, as he looked backwards to Rubens for much of his inspiration but applied his knowledge to contemporary subjects and ‘exotic’ (at least considered so during the time) themes, such as Chios and Morocco. What I continue to appreciate about this series is that the author points out a lot of the short comings and negative reception many of the pieces received upon debut.

It’s interesting to see how formative his trip to Morocco was in his development as an artist. I will always be curious to know how different his art would be if he journeys to Rome instead.

Quotes/Excerpts:
- The most powerful influence from the past was Peter Paul Rubens, whom Delacroix came to call ‘the king of painters’ and ‘that Homer of painting’. He had a lifelong and abiding passion for the paintings of Rubens, and made about thirty painted copies and more than a hundred drawings from them.
- At Guérin’s studio Delacroix met Charles-Émile Champmartin (1797-1883), Ary Scheffer (1795-1858) and, most importantly, Théodore Géricault (1791-1824).
- Delacroix’s attitude to his elder [Géricault] was ambivalent. He later wrote ‘… he was not precisely a friend of mine…’ and ‘Although he gave me the most friendly welcome, the difference of our ages and my admiration for him put me in the position of a respectful pupil in regard to him.’
- (On The Barque of Dante) Rather than simply illustrating a single episode from the Inferno, he created an original and inventive amalgamation of narrative elements, in which the two poets are ferried by the angry boatman Phlegias across a muddy stretch of water to the iron-walled flaming city of Dis. The reactions of Dante and Virgil form the focus of the painting as they are confronted by the wrathful sinners… The frieze-like composition was conventional, the figures appearing in profile, close to the viewer and with little suggestion of depth. But unlike most other history paintings at the 1822 Salon, the representation of the drama, horror and anguish of a journey to the underworld meant the picture had no obvious morally uplifting or didactic content… The depiction of water also gave him the opportunity to experiment with ideas about pure color and light refraction. On the three foreground figures clutching at the side of the boat, drops of water are suggested by dabs of pure, unmixed pigment: white for the highlights, then green and yellow juxtaposed for the halftone and reflection, and red in the shadows… Dante and Virgil can be interpreted in a number of ways. Delacroix identified strongly with the figure of the Italian poet who, like the artist, had to voyage into the unknown to feed his imagination; this was the first of a number of paintings of suffering or alienated poets. As authors, Virgil and Dante represented ancient and modern literature, and Virgil’s physical support of Dante in the painting might be seen as tradition forming the basis for innovation, for Delacroix would have known that Dante based the Divine Comedy on the sixth book of Virgil’s Aeneid.
- (On Chios) On April 11th 1822 a large Turkish force under the command of Kara Ali Pasha arrived, and for the next 2 months an orgy of destruction and violence was unleashed. More than 40 villages were ransacked and burnt, and from a population of nearly 90,000 people only 900 remained. About 20,000 people had been killed and the rest were sold into slavery… Originally he planned a kneeling bare-breasted mother grieving over her dead body, but he then greatly increased the pathos by substituting a beautifully pallid dead mother with her child vainly trying to suckle from lifeless beasts. Voutier was probably the source of this change; in his memoirs he quotes an eyewitness from Chios as saying this happened… When the painting was exhibited at the 1824 Salon many critics condemned the lack of heroism, criticizing Delacroix for making the Greeks look so ugly and dejected as to be unrecognizable as the descendants of noble ancient warriors. The dying, dark skinned figure looked of mixed race, suggesting enfeeblement of pure Greek blood – indeed, Delacroix called him a mulatto. Such a negative depiction of the vanquished was unlikely to mobilize converts for the Greek cause, although one critic did observe that beauty and nobility could only flourish under liberty. But for his opponents Delacroix had departed too far from the Classical ideal, and his approach was as shocking as the barbarous acts of the Turks. His decision to paint the aftermath of the massacres also resulted in a fragmented and disjointed composition that was difficult to read as a coherent narrative. Even the once supportive Gros commented, ‘it’s the Massacre of Painting’. Others thought Delacroix had strayed into territory of melodrama or the horror novel. Gérard noted the young artist’s risk-taking and quipped, ‘Monsieur Delacroix is a man who runs along the rooftops.’ … Delacroix’s use of seemingly unrelated and unrealistic colors also attracted criticism. Thiers remarked in a generally favorable article, ‘…it was not necessary to throw such colors together, to set so many yellow corpses against so many blue corpses with no other purpose than to establish a great struggle of effects…’. Stendhal, however wrote that, ‘M. Delacroix has a feeling for color. I seem to see in him a pupil of Tintoretto…’, thus paying him great compliment of kinship with the celebrated Venetian colorist. Delacroix’s work lacked the polish required of a major historical work and critics advised him to rectify this fault in technique.
- Beauty and ideal were replaced by greater realism, compositions seemed to lack a single focus, and there was a sensationalist and vulgar attraction for displays of high emotion and violence.
- (Delacroix on being called a Romantic) “If by romanticism one understands the free manifestation of my personal impressions, my aversion to the models copied in the schools, and my loathing for academic formulas, I must confess that I am not only romantic, but I was so at the age of fifteen; I already preferred Prud’hon and Gros to Guérin and Girodet.” . . . ‘I found myself, and still find myself, in a strange situation. Most of those who have taken my side were, in general, merely taking their own… and using me as a flag. They have enlisted me, whether I would or no, into the Romantic coterie.’
- (On The Death of Sardanapalus) Dlecroix’s description “The rebels besiege him in his palace… Lying on a superb bed, atop an immense pyre, Saranapalus gives the order to his eunuchs and palace officers to slit the throats of his women, his pages, and even his horses and favorite dogs; none of the objects that served his pleasure should survive him … Aischeh, a Bactrian woman, not wishing to be out to death by a slave, hung herself from the columns supporting the vault … Baleah, Sardanapalus’ cup-bearer, finally sets fire to the pyre and throws himself upon it”. . . . In Bryon’s play a cup is brought so that the king can ‘… drain one draught in memory of many a joyous banquet past’, and in the picture a slave brings a golden wine cup and ewer. Such an action also suggests a hint of sadistic pleasure or satisfaction at the destruction before his eyes. In the play Sardanapalus dreams of his death and defeat, and in placing him on a bed Delacroix brings together dream and fulfillment, as well as, perhaps, referring to his legendary invention. Like Marino Faliero, Sardanapalus was a character of ambiguous morality, and once again Delacroix gives the viewer no unequivocal visual directions on how to interpret his actions. Unlike the virtuous deathbed scenes of Roman and Greek antiquity – in which statesmen, generals or philosophers such as Marcus Aurelius, Germanicus or Socrates make their dignified farewells surrounded by family, friends and loyal servants – Sardanapalus’ end was accompanied only by a single concubine, probably his mistress Myrrha, prostrate at the side of the bed. This bed has ivory-carved elephant heads at its lower corners, and the apparent somnolence of these creatures forms a curious and unsettling contrast to the frenzied activity. . . The canvas bursts with action and energy, chromatically brilliant and mosaic-like, but in his intoxication with flesh, precious gems and sumptuous, exotic materials, Delacroix lost a clear sense of the overall tone of the whole and of the relationship between the parts. Highlights are scattered, and the eye wanders from passage to passage with no obvious emphasis of climax. Years later he conceded that he had perhaps been overcome with enthusiasm for color effects and commented, ‘Today my palette is not what it was. Perhaps it is less brilliant, but it no longer wanders. It is an instrument that only plays what I want it to play.’ . . . Delacroix’s unconventional approach puzzled the critics, who found the work incomprehensible and maladroit; the critic Delécluze bluntly called it ‘a mistake’. However, journalists did not dwell at any great length in their accounts since Sardanapalus was considered an error rather than a problem that needed explanation. Even a Romantic sympathizer such as the critic and politician Ludovic Vitet felt that Delacroix had stepped ‘beyond the bounds of independence and originality’ and jeopardized the credibility of the new school of Romanticism with his extremes of expression and assaults on the senses and good taste. . . Such extreme hostility surprised and wounded Delacroix; so violent was the reaction that he called the episode his ‘Waterloo’.
- (Mephistopheles in Flight) The book’s frontispiece with a cunning demon flying over a medieval city, is a grotesque transformation of a muscular Michelangelo nude with savage talons that is also reminiscent of Goya’s ‘There it Goes’ from his Los Caprichos.
- (About The Murder of the Bishop of Liège) ‘Tomorrow I will attack that accursed tablecloth, which will be either Austerlitz or Waterloo’. When Villot returned the next day, Delacroix answered the door dressed in his painting clothes, palette in hand and said, ‘It’s Austerlitz’. He also said that the work was best appreciated by lamplight.
- (On 28 July: Liberty Leading the People) ‘I have undertaken a modern subject, a barricade, and if I have won no victories for the nation, at least I will paint for it’. . . Silhouetted against a backdrop of cannon smoke the figure of Liberty is a combination of the real and the ideal, the palpable and the ephemeral. On her head she wears the red cap of liberty, popularized during the first French Revolution and derived from the ancient Roman Phrygian cap, the emblem of freed slaves. Bare-breasted and holding the tricolore in one hand and an infantry rifle and bayonet in the other, she appears as half-goddess and half-woman of the people, and in 1831 the German poet Heinrich Heine called her ‘… a strange mixture of ‘Phryne [a fabled prostitute of antiquity], fishwife and goddess of Liberty’. Delacroix’s knowledge of Classical art was an important factor in shaping her appearance, and she is based partially on the recently acquired prize exhibit of the Louvre, the Venus de Milo, and on ancient personifications of a wingless Victory.
- His Journal records a high degree of personal attention for the half-domes: “In my kind of painting it is impossible for the collaborator to finish something in such a way that I do not need to change anything. I am sure he could treat the subject with a great deal of talent, but for him to do it as I see it, he would have to be another me.”
- (On The Justice of Trajan) was sent to the 1840 Salon, it’s subject taken from Antoni Deschamp’s 1829 French translation of Canto X of Dante’s Purgatory, in which a poor widow halted the emperor on his way to war to plead for justice for her murdered son. Though Trajan tried to put her off until his return, she insisted and he bowed to her wishes. Delacroix worked on a large scale and ensured spectator involvement by the direct confrontation between the mother and the emperor across the foreground and by the head of the dead boy on the edge of the picture plane. A low viewpoint increased the sense of an abrupt halt to the impetus of the convoy – on the right another mother pulls her son out of the way in the nick of time. A dramatic shadow cuts across the acutely angled architecture of a triumphal arch or gateway and the head of the horse, though the unconvincing sense of depth and recession is reminiscent of a stage set.
- (On the Entry of the Crusaders into Constantinople) The event took place during the fourth crusade, which started out as an attempt to free Jerusalem from the Muslims but which turned into a power struggle between the Latin (Roman) and Greek (Byzantine) Churches and a ruthless drive to extend Venetian trading interests. The crusades never reached the Holy Land, instead diverting to Constantinople, the capital of Byzantium, where July 1203 they restored the deposed Greek emperor Isaac Angelus to his throne as co-ruler with his son Alexius IV. Alexius was soon killed by one of his own courtiers, who declared himself Alexius V. In response the crusaders stormed and ransacked Constantinople over three days, beginning on April 12th 1204. Although the crusaders were reluctant to attack fellow Christians, they had been told by their clergy that the Orthodox Greeks were little better than Muslims. The Byzantine empire was afterwards divided among the crusaders and the Venetians, whose commercial power gained immeasurably from the sack of the city; Baldwin, Count of Flanders, was set up as puppet Latin emperor. . . Delacroix called the painting his ‘third massacre’. . . Two main planes make up the painting: the high foreground of the crusaders and, behind, the ransacked Constantinople, with the blue waters of the natural inland harbor of the Golden Horn on the left and the Bosphorus on the right. The terrible progress of the crusaders through the city is evident, and smoke darkens an overcast sky. Yet the picture is restrained in comparison to The Massacres of Chios and is based on the diagonal accents and measured rhetoric of the Baroque, rather than the emotion and violence of 1820s Romanticism. Some commentators felt there was insufficient historical detail, but Delacroix moved from the specific to the universal, and the painting exudes both a sad gloom and an eerie calm in the midst of great brutality and horror.
- (On the Basket of Flowers Overturned in a Park) Delacroix had made flower studies before but never in this scale. They represented a search for certainty in a traditional and uncontroversial genre and a withdrawal into a private world of color, where the only decisions to be made were artistic. Delacroix explained what he was trying to do in a long letter of February 1849, writing that he wanted his treatments to be free from the vases, drapes and columns that were the usual conventions of flower painting. For him too many flower painters concentrated on the botanical details, but his paintings were to be like a bouquet of flowers where the overall effect was more important than the individual blooms. ‘I have tried to do studies of nature as it occurs in a garden, merely by putting together inside the same frame – in a way which is not very probable – the greatest possible variety of flowers.’
- (On Heliodorus Driven from the Temple) “Having presented himself with his guards to take away the treasures, he is suddenly knocked down by a mysterious horseman: at the same time two heavenly envoys throw themselves upon him and beat him furiously with rods until he is cast out of the sacred precincts.” . . . Raphael had famously painted the scene in the Vatican Stanze, and just as Delacroix had measured himself against Rubens with the 1855 Lion Hunt, he did the same with Raphael in Heliodorus. Though he had not seen the original, Delacroix had been impressed by a copy painted by two former pupils of Ingres - Raymond and Paul Blaze - which was shown in the Panthéon from 1847. In his version the grey steed of the implacable horseman pins the prone Heliodorus amid his plunder while the heavenly messengers provide relentless barrage of scourge blows. . . The stories of Jacob and Heliodorus both dealt with individuals who, after leading less-than-perfect lives, became faithful witnesses to God’s power following their angelic encounters. There is perhaps an oblique reference to St Sulpice himself, a seventh-century Bishop of Bourges who was the patron Saint of delayed vocations, having only joined the priesthood in his forties. Conceivably Delacroix also saw both episodes as metaphors for the ‘blessing’ achieved by the artist after battling with his ideas and materials, and while working on the chapel he wrote, ‘This eternal struggle, instead of beating me down, raises me up.’
- (Delacroix’s artistic credo) “The first merit of a painting is to be a feast for the eyes. This does not mean that there need be no sense in it; it is like poetry which, if it offends the ear, all the sense in the world will not save it from being bad. They speak of having an ear for music: not every eye is suitable to savor the subtle joys of painting. The eyes of many people are dull or false; they see their objects literally, of the exquisite they see nothing.”

[TWAndini__ · Rating 5 out of 5]

I spent 7 hours to finish this book

This is a comprehensive introduction and an insightful reappraisal of the life and works of one of the most influential artists of the 19th century.

Eugène Delacroix (1798-1863) is a French Romantic artist. My fav arts in this book includes :
- Sketch for the death of Sardanapalus, 1827
- Detail of 28 July: Liberty leading the people, 1830. I have my own memories with this one. Had long discussion with one of my senior in yogyakarta
- Three studies of cats, 1843. Declaroix was decidely a cat rather than a dog lover and made numerous studies of domestic cats. He saw characteristic of "sensuality, exoticism, independence" and contemporaries described the artist " handsome as a tiger"
- On the other page, he put Chopin in a drawing which cast as Dante. Superb!

Well done!!

[Edie Lee · Rating 5 out of 5]

Delacroix was a master of color. His compositions create excitement and spur the imagination. He influenced many twentieth century artists and is considered one of the history’s greatest painters.

The Phaidon “Arts and Ideas” series gives context to art movements and individuals. I say with confidence that both those already familiar with Delacroix and those who are new to him will profit from this reading.

Although the small pictures were not ideal (the size of the book necessitated this) they were all in color, something essential given the subject. They illustrated the artist’s works as well as pertinent ones by others. A few double page spreads suffered by the crack in the middle but not much can be done about that.

Highly recommended.

[Marius · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very like this book. So informative and well-written.

[Dylan Rock · Rating 5 out of 5]

A wonderful study art book and biography of Eugene Delacroix the artist, the time in which he lived and his influence on subsequent artist.