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| DELACROIX, Eugene |
| What
moves those of genius, what inspires their work is not new ideas,
but their obsession with the idea that what has already been said
is still not enough. - Eugene Delacroix |
 |
 |
 |
DELACROIX, Ferdinand Victor Eugene, French painter born in Charenton-SaintMaurice, near Paris, April 26, 1798 and died in Paris, Aug. 13, 1863. His father was an ardent revolutionist who died when Eugene was seven years of age. He was sent to the Lycee Napoleon and then to the atelier of Pierre Narcisse Guerin to study painting.
His first painting, Dante and Virgil in the Infernal Regions, attracted much notice in the exhibition of 1822. This picture displayed a wide departure from the coloring and manner of the school of Jacques Louis David, and accordingly it gave rise to enthusiastic praise on the one side and on the other to contemptuous depreciation, but everywhere to wonder.
His Massacre of Scio (1824) was a declaration of war against the school of the classicists, who named it a "Massacre of Painting." These were followed by the Execution of the Doge Marino Falieri (1826); the Death of Sardanapalus (1827); and the Murder of the Bishop of Liege (1830) painted with fire and vigor. His sympathy with the revolutionary party was shown by his celebrated picture of the Goddess of Liberty at the Barricades. In 1831 he joined the embassy sent by Louis Philippe to the emperor of Morocco. To this journey we are indebted for several pictures remarkable for their vivid realization of life as well as their masterly coloring. They are the Jewish Marriage; Muley Abderrahman With His Body-guard; Algerian Ladies in Their Chamber; Moorish Soldiers at Exercise; and several scenes of common life. In spite of his genius Delacroix failed in gaining popularity with the general public. He was commissioned not only with the decoration of the Luxembourg Palace, the Chambre des Deputes, and the Louvre, but large paintings were executed by him for the Parisian churches. The Versailles museum contains two of his master-pieces-the Battle of Taillebowrg (1837), and the Taking of Constantinople by the Crusaders (1841).
Delacroix created in a savage frenzy, which his friend, the poet Charles Pierre Baudelaire, compared to "a volcano artistically hidden by bouquets of flowers." According to Alfred Robaut and Ernest Chesneau who, besides Maurice Tourneux and Theophile Silvestre, catalogued Delacroix' works, he painted no fewer than 853 canvases, 1,525 pastels and water colors, and made 6,629 drawings, including the sketches for his monumental decorative compositions. This vast output comprised, along with the exotic material gathered in his travels and scenes of contemporary wars and revolutions, many subjects for which Delacroix drew inspiration from the classics of literature; the Bible, Homer, Aeschylus, Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare, Ariosto, Goethe, Scott, and Byron, all provided him with material for canvases of tragic violence.
Notable works of Delacroix are owned privately in the United States as well
as by leading galleries. The Abduction of Rebecca (1846), Christ on Lake Gennesaret,
and George Sand's Garden at Nohant are in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New
York; the Walters Art Gallery, Baltimore, has three canvases; other representative
works are to be found in the Fogg Museum, Cambridge, Mass.; Minneapolis Institute
of Arts; Phillips Memorial Gallery, Washington, D.C.; Cincinnati Art Museum;
and Chicago Art Institute.