French painter and engraver “Romantic in spite of him”, Eugene Delacroix claims himself at the end of his life of the traditional ideal and wants to be the heir to the great tradition colourist, of Venetian in Rubens.
The apparent antithesis between tradition and modernity, classicism and romanticism summarizes contradictions of a work which light, without however elucidating them, the Newspaper and Correspondence.
Years of training Born in Saint-Maurice, close to Paris, in 1798, Eugene Delacroix has as a father a civil servant of the Directory (a time Minister for the Foreign relations) and Empire, and it belongs, by his mother, with the dynasty of Oeben-Riesener, but the rumor very early makes him a natural son of Talleyrand. It receives with the imperial College (current Louis-the-Large college) the bases of a good traditional culture. It enters in 1815 the workshop of Pierre-Narcisse Guerin, then at the School of the fine arts.
Parallel to this academic teaching, Delacroix copies the Masters with the museum of Louvre, component its own Pantheon artistic - in which Rubens holds the place of honor, and to which it will not cease referring. The assiduous reading of the great classics like that of the contemporary historical novels, the practice and the love of the music mark of their print all the work of that which one will describe as “Wagner of painting”.
The leader of the pictorial romanticism Under the influence of Large, which took again the workshop of David at the time of the exile of the Master in 1815, then under that of Géricault, Delacroix is tested with the great painting of history. It begins with the Living room from 1822 with Dante and Virgile, which is worth many criticisms and some praises to him: Large the work of “punished Rubens qualifies”. This fabric, bought by Louis XVIII for the museum of Luxembourg, illustrates song VIII of the Hell of Dante: the Divine comedy will provide many subjects to all the romantic generation.
After this first success, Delacroix engages in the representation of the modern history through a succession of fabrics inspired by the war of independence of the Greeks against the Turks. These works, for the majority exposed to the Living room, devote Delacroix as chief of the new romantic school. Among these tables, Greece expiring on the ruins of Missolonghi puts in scene Greece under the features of an young woman in national costume, upright on a block of stone from where the hand of a dead insurrectionist emerges. Delacroix mingles the traditional language with it allegory and a realism without concession, according to a formula which it will include in particular in Freedom guiding the people.
The Death of Sardanapale, presented to the Living room of 1827-1828, is probably the most romantic work of the young artist (it is not yet thirty years old). The subject takes as a starting point a very free manner of the tragedy of Byron (1821) and traditional sources. This vast fabric, in a coloured harmony worthy of Rubens, shows ordering Sardanapale that one cuts the throat of all the living beings of his palate and that one burns his goods, whereas the insurrectionists are on the point of invading his residence. The topic, which mixes the love with death in an ultimate esthetic act, concerns an exacerbated feeling which will violently be condemned by the critic.
In the years 1830, parallel to these works inspired by the modern history or the literature, Delacroix carries out several large tables of medieval history, the such Battle of Poitiers, ordered by the duchess of Berry in 1829, who was to allow Delacroix to join again with a kind somewhat fallen in disuse after the fall from the Empire. With the Battle of Nancy (1831), which evokes the death of Charles the Bold, it finds the great epic inspiration which characterized the first romanticism resulting from the Empire, and of which painting Large remainder best testimony.
Its desire to return to the painting of history a dimension which is not only that of the anecdote or the political hagiography still expresses in the Battle of Taillebourg, order placed in 1834 by Louis-Philippe for the historical museum of Versailles. The Catch of Constantinople by the crusaders (1841), intended for the same museum, is one of more great successes: by the tragic breath which animates it, it has the appearance of an allegory of the miseries of war, where the other scenes of battle of the museum are generally only the dry ones and grandiloquent inordinately increased illustrations.
Literary inspiration In the years 1820-1830, Delacroix meets in the literary living rooms Stendhal, Mérimée, Dumas and soon George Sand and Chopin, of which it carries out the portraits. The literary inspiration is present throughout the career of the painter, Dante and Virgile (1822) with Ugolin and its sons (1860). Dante, Shakespeare (Hamlet), Walter Scott (Quentin Durward) or Byron provide him a vast repertory of subjects, where the originality of the form yields it of nothing to that the topic.
In its Newspaper, Delacroix tells how the literature ignites its spirit; the literary anecdote, given to the mode by the painters of the style troubadour, is then magnified by a tragic or epic dimension, an attention paid to the psychology of the characters who are lacking with the majority of his contemporaries and whom it translates in a rich matter, handsomely spread out, with many superimposed glazes which excite the transparency, the luminosity and the depth of the image. To the skill of the school of Ingres, Delacroix opposes the richness of a trade lengthily worked and ever acquired: “The great business, it is to avoid this infernal convenience of the brush. Make rather the matter difficult to work like marble. It would be completely new.”
The practice of the lithography, undoubtedly with the example of Géricault or Goya, enables him to look further into its search for expression. It thus illustrates Faust de Goethe and Hamlet de Shakespeare, masterpieces of the romantic lithography.
Vital energy, passion, the unlimited resources of imagination - “all in him was only energy”, Baudelaire will say - consume of an interior fire which it will not have of cease to control. This intense fight, contained by a moral stoicism, confers on its work a specific poetry, often dramatic, which make vain any opposition with the serene nature of Billhook or with this “ideal half of health makes, half of calm, almost of indifference” which Baudelaire in connection with Ingres (Living room of 1855) evokes.
The call of the East In 1832, the count Charles de Mornay, who must go on mission near the sultan of Morocco, invites Delacroix to accompany it, whereas, from the campaigns of the armies of Bonaparte in Egypt, the painters were waked up with the beauty and the poetry particular of the East magnified by the dreams of Europeans. Delacroix carries out very many sketches, and the memory of this voyage, which in the glare of the Mediterranean light reveals a new aspect of the beings and objects to him, will carefully be maintained by these drafts: it will feed from now on a whole share of its work, one will find of it the trace in his scenes of hunting and until his mural decorations.
But the tables which Morocco inspires in Delacroix make the good share with imagination. It is, with truth, a revivified Antiquity which he discovers, so that he notes in his Newspaper: “It is beautiful, it is as at the time of Homère!” Its first concern is not ethnographic, but pictorial: with the Women of Algiers (1834), interior rich person of colors and perfumes, where silk, mother-of-pearl and gold shine in the half-light, populated gifted bodies of a real physical presence and of a very animal grace, Delacroix, by the timelessness of the topic and the serenity of the composition, fact appears of traditional while expressing his own design of the “resongé” East.
The decorator The great mural decoration, carried out the tables of Living rooms parallel to, occupies the painter until the end of his life. The destination, often prestigious, of these decorations then required artists to conceive iconographic vast programs, strongly structured. By the force of its convictions and the width of its achievements, Delacroix is placed at the very first row of the large decorators of the time. Between 1833 and 1837, it carries out a set of paintings for the living room of the King of the Bourbon palate and another for the library. This last unit opposes Orphée, metaphor of civilization and arts, in Attila, symbol of the destruction and cruelty. The constraints related to the building, the need for illustrating new ideas oblige the artists to renew their technique and their means of expression.
The way chosen by Delacroix hardly has equivalent: whereas most painters are satisfied to transpose the style of painting of rest on the walls, it joins again with the tradition of the large decoration exit of the XVIIe century, of the companies of Versailles of the XVIIIe century and the art of Tiepolo. Between 1841 and 1846, he works with the palate of Luxembourg to the decoration of the library of the Senate before decorating, in 1850-1851, the central ceiling of the gallery of Apollo in Louvre: the immense victorious Apollon composition of the Python snake fits remarkably in the decoration of the Brown one. The last civil murals of Delacroix, carried out for the Town hall of Paris, will disappear in the fire from 1871.
Religious painting Baudelaire holds Delacroix for one of the best interpreters of the religious feeling of his time: “The serious sadness of its talent is appropriate perfectly for our religion, deeply sad religion, religion of the universal pain”.
Since 1826, Delacroix receives the ordering of Christ to the garden of the Olive-trees for the Saint-Paul-Saint-Louis church. To the traditional image of the intercession of the helpful angel, he opposes the tragedy, the pain and death. He will carry out his last large decoration for the vault of the Saint-Angels of the Saint-Sulpice church, in Paris; completed in 1861, it is composed of three large strengthened fabrics: the Fight of Jacob with the angel and Héliodore driven out of the Temple on the walls, and Saint Michel embanking the dragon with the ceiling of the vault.
The plastic language is not any more that of the romanticism of the beginning of the century, the religious expression was interiorized; the maturity of the feeling and the perfect control of the technique connect work with the great achievements of growing old Titien or Tintoret, in Scuola di San Rocco in Venice.