Delacroix

Eugene Delacroix was born on April 26, 1798, at Charenton-Saint-Maurice. His father had been foreign minister at the time of the Directory, and then became a prefect of the empire, under Napoleon, in Marseilles and Bordeaux. Rumor has it, however, that his real father was the famous statesman Talleyrand, who in fact gave his patronage to the artist in the early part of his career. After an initial training under the neoclassical painter Pierre Guerin, a follower of David, Delacroix came into contact with Gericault, posing for The Raft of the Medusa in 1817. The young painter, who started to work independently in 1818, seems to have been influenced by the examples of Michelangelo and Rubens, and in those same years threw himself into a passionate study of Dante and Petrarch. He took part in the Salon d'Automne for the first time in 1822 with the picture The Barque of Dante (Louvre, Paris), fruit of his literary leanings and in a typical-ly Romantic mold. Two years later he painted the canvas The Massacre at Chios (Louvre, Paris), illustrating an episode of the Greek war of liber-ation from the Turks. Out of personal preference, and following the example of Gericault, whom he greatly admired and who died that same year, Delacroix turned his attention to events of contemporary history. Stylistically the work was programmatically opposed to the classicism of Ingres and the disciples of David. In the twenties Delacroix got to know Victor Hugo (collaborating with him on several stage productions) and in 1825 made a journey to England. While there lie encountered the work of Constable, which was to exercise a profound influence on him. In 1827 he showed eleven canvases at the Salon, including the Death of Sardanapal. In 1830 he finished his most famous painting, Liberty Leading the Peo-ple, and in the same period commenced his activity as an essayist and art critic.
In 1831 he was awarded the Legion d'Honneur and was invited to accompany the delegation of the French government to the sultan of Morocco. The African experience of 1832 influenced his oil painting style, particularly in his choice of exotic art subjects, which were to encounter considerable success. Over the following years, thanks to shrewd exploitation of his social contacts, he obtained numerous official commissions from the government, espe-cially during the reign of Louis-Philippe. The presence of as many as forty-two of his paintings at the Universal Exposition of 1855 was a sort of of-ficial consecration for Delacroix, whose genius was extolled by Baudelaire. In an article for Le Pays that year he wrote: "How will posterity view Delacroix? They will say that he was a unique concord of the most astonishing qualities; that he had, like Rembrandt, a sense of intimacy and of inner magic, a spirit of combination and decoration like Rubens and Charles Le Brun and the color of Paolo Veronese." Eugene Delacroix died in Paris on August 13, 1863.