Eugène Delacroix

Eugène Delacroix: The Volcano Behind the Flowers

When *The Massacre at Scio* went up at the Salon of 1824, one critic called it "the Massacre of Painting" and others condemned its loose handling simply as *le laid* — the ugly. Ingres, the keeper of the neoclassical line, is said to have asked for the windows of the Louvre to be opened to clear the smell of sulphur Delacroix had left behind him. Baudelaire, who understood him better than anyone, described him as "a volcanic crater artistically concealed behind bouquets of flowers." All three verdicts are, in their way, correct.

A Son of the Empire

He was born on 26 April 1798 at Charenton-Saint-Maurice, outside Paris, the youngest of four children with siblings much older than himself. His father, Charles Delacroix, had been Minister of Foreign Affairs and ambassador to Holland, and was later prefect of Marseille and of Bordeaux; he died when Eugène was six. His mother Victoire was the daughter of Jean-François Oeben, the cabinetmaker who had worked for Louis XV. She died in 1814. Delacroix was sixteen, an orphan, and connected by blood to both revolutionary politics and the finest craft tradition of the ancien régime.

Guérin's Studio and Géricault's Raft

He was educated at the Lycée Impérial — now Louis-le-Grand — where he made friendships that lasted his life, and in 1815, with the support of his uncle Henri-François Riesener, entered the studio of the painter Pierre-Narcisse Guérin. There he fell under the influence of Théodore Géricault, seven years his senior and already the most dangerous talent in France. In 1819 Delacroix posed for one of the figures in *The Raft of the Medusa*. The young man learned his trade inside the most notorious painting of the age.

Scandal as a Career

He submitted *Dante and Virgil in Hell* to the Salon of 1822 at twenty-four, and from that point every major canvas was an event and most were an outrage. *The Massacre at Scio* (Salon of 1824) took the Ottoman slaughter of Greeks and refused to organise it into heroic order; it gave the public suffering without consolation. *The Death of Sardanapalus* (1827) staged an Assyrian king's annihilation of his concubines, horses and treasure in a churning red delirium that violated nearly every academic rule about composition and restraint. He visited England in the summer of 1825, his only foreign travel until Morocco.

Then came the July Revolution. *Liberty Leading the People*, shown at the Salon of 1831, was bought by the government, and it has done duty ever since on French banknotes and postage stamps as the supreme emblem of the Republic. What makes it a serious painting rather than a poster is that it declines to look away from the cost: Liberty strides forward over corpses, and the picture registers both the seduction of revolution and its violence.

Morocco, 1832

In January 1832 Delacroix joined the Comte de Mornay's diplomatic mission to Morocco. He was away roughly six months, and he never got over it. He filled notebooks with watercolours and drew on them for the rest of his career, producing more than seventy paintings on Moroccan subjects. "The aspect of this country will remain forever in my eyes," he wrote, "all my life long the men of this noble race will live and move in my memory."

The journey also exposed the limits of his access. Religious prohibitions on depicting the human figure made Muslim models hard to secure, so he sketched mainly Jewish subjects — a detail worth holding onto, because it shows how mediated the "authentic" East of nineteenth-century French painting actually was.

The Colourist's Argument

Delacroix's real contribution was theoretical, and he worked it out with a brush rather than a pen. He understood complementary contrast — warm yellows and oranges set against cool blues and violets — and he practised the division of tones, laying down separate strokes of unmixed colour that the eye combines at a distance. Colour, for him, was not applied to a drawing; it was the structure and the emotional content at once. Cézanne called it "moral colour."

"Give me the mud from the streets," Delacroix boasted, "and I shall make of it the delicious tones of a woman's flesh." He held that "the primary merit of a painting is to be a feast for the eye," and warned that "nature is a vast dictionary" from which "those who have no imagination copy." On the label everyone attached to him he was unrepentant: "If by romanticism one means the free manifestation of my personal impulses, I must confess that not only am I a romantic, I was from the age of 15."

The Walls

Beneath the scandals sat an enormous career as a decorator of French public buildings — the least visited part of his output today, and the bulk of his working hours. He painted *Christ in the Garden of Olives* for Saint-Paul-Saint-Louis in 1826, the Salon du Roi at the Palais Bourbon from 1834, the library ceiling of the Chambre des Députés from 1837, the Senate library at the Palais du Luxembourg in the mid-1840s, and the ceiling of the Galerie d'Apollon at the Louvre in the early 1850s.

The last and greatest was the Chapel of the Holy Angels at Saint-Sulpice, which occupied him from 1849 to 1861: *Jacob Wrestling with the Angel*, *Heliodorus Driven from the Temple*, *Saint Michael Slaying the Dragon*. In 1857 he moved to the rue de Furstenberg specifically to be near the work.

The Journal, and the End

Throughout his life he kept a journal, later published in three volumes, recording working methods, aesthetic argument and daily practicalities — one of the indispensable documents of nineteenth-century art. The 1855 World Fair honoured him with a retrospective of more than thirty works. In January 1857, on his seventh attempt, he was finally elected to the Académie des Beaux-Arts. He kept a house at Champrosay, and from about 1835 was looked after by his housekeeper Jenny Le Guillou. He died in his rue de Furstenberg apartment on 13 August 1863.

Why Eugène Is Called a Genius

The specific faculty was optical intelligence: Delacroix worked out, by eye and at the easel, how colours behave in each other's company, and then built entire pictures on the finding. Complementary contrast and the division of tones were his discoveries in practice decades before anyone formalised the science, and they are the technical foundation of everything that followed. Seurat built pointillism on the division of tones. Monet and Pissarro credited it as foundational. Van Gogh took the complementary contrasts wholesale. Cézanne said Delacroix had the best colour palette in France and painted an *Apotheosis of Delacroix*. Baudelaire installed him as the leader not merely of Romanticism but of modernity itself.

The counter-case begins with the fact that the establishment resisted him for thirty-five years and needed seven ballots to admit him — which testifies to his originality, but also reflects a genuine and lasting charge: that his drawing is slack, that his figures dissolve where Ingres's hold, that energy substitutes for construction. The Orientalist works, once his most admired, are now read as a colonial fantasy produced under the protection of a French diplomatic mission, and his own account of substituting Jewish sitters for Muslim ones concedes how staged that vision was. *Sardanapalus* stages the destruction of women as visual luxury. And the vast public murals he considered his life's real labour are today largely unlooked at.

Legacy

He is the hinge on which European painting turned from describing the world to constructing a sensation of it. Every painter who has ever laid a stroke of orange beside a stroke of blue to make both burn hotter is working inside Delacroix's discovery.

Achievements

• Knight of the Legion of Honour
• Officer of the Legion of Honour
• Commander of the Legion of Honour
• Notable work: A Young Tiger Playing with its Mother
• Notable work: Liberty Leading the People
• Notable work: Babylonian Captivity
• Notable work: The Massacre at Chios
• Movement: Romanticism