Eugene Delacroix: Further Correspondence, 1817-1863

by Eugène Delacroix, Lee Johnson (Editor)

This book is comprised of a new collection of over 200 letters by the foremost French Romantic painter, the greater number of which are previously unpublished. They date from every decade of Delacroix's career, are addressed to a wide variety of correspondents, from domestic servants or artisans to famous writers such as Stendhal and George Sand, and shed light on his attitudes on politics, religion, and patronage of the arts, as well as revealing more intimate aspects of his relations with family and women.

302 pages, Hardcover

First published November 28, 1991

About the author

Ferdinand Victor Eugène Delacroix (April 26, 1798 - August 13, 1893) was a French Romantic artist regarded from the outset of his career as the leader of the French Romantic school.

Delacroix's use of expressive brushstrokes and his study of the optical effects of colour profoundly shaped the work of the Impressionists, while his passion for the exotic inspired the artists of the Symbolist movement. A fine lithographer, Delacroix illustrated various works of William Shakespeare, the Scottish writer Sir Walter Scott and the German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.

In contrast to the Neoclassical perfectionism of his chief rival Ingres, Delacroix took for his inspiration the art of Rubens and painters of the Venetian Renaissance, with an attendant emphasis on color and movement rather than clarity of outline and carefully modeled form. Dramatic and romantic content characterized the central themes of his maturity, and led him not to the classical models of Greek and Roman art, but to travel in North Africa, in search of the exotic. Friend and spiritual heir to Théodore Géricault, Delacroix was also inspired by Byron, with whom he shared a strong identification with the "forces of the sublime", of nature in often violent action.

However, Delacroix was given neither to sentimentality nor bombast, and his Romanticism was that of an individualist. In the words of Baudelaire, "Delacroix was passionately in love with passion, but coldly determined to express passion as clearly as possible."