In the previous articles in this series I have shown a substantial selection of the paintings of Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863). It’s time to take stock of them, here in establishing which are his masterworks.

By far the greatest influence over his early paintings was a vast canvas exhibited to great acclaim at the Paris Salon of 1819, when Delacroix had been studying at the École des Beaux-Arts for three years, and in the same year that he obtained his first independent commission for a painting.

Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa (1818-19) uses a relatively traditional approach to give it the air of complete authenticity, although its composition was carefully manipulated in several ways to make the artist’s point. Géricault and Delacroix were to remain great friends as mentor and protégé until the former’s death five years later, and this influence was to echo repeatedly through the rest of Delacroix’s career.

Two years later, Delacroix set his sights on his own success at the Salon with a literal depiction of Canto 8 of Dante’s Inferno, showing Dante and Virgil crossing the river Acheron by boat.

He painted The Barque of Dante over an intense period of a little over two and a half months, just in time for its submission. It was ambitious in taking a well-known post-classical narrative and presenting it in the context of Géricault’s masterpiece, with rough water and strong winds, and the sinners around the small craft. He was fortunate in having little competition that year, and it was purchased by the State.

His style derives from that of Géricault, with the richer chroma of Rubens. He also started to experiment with colour theory in showing tiny splashes of colour in droplets of water on the skin of those in the water. These are topics I’ll return to in a future article, but it’s clear that Delacroix was decidedly unimpressed with the Neoclassicism of David.

For his next assault on the Salon, he chose the contemporary Greek War of Independence, very modern history indeed.

Delacroix’s huge painting of The Massacre at Chios (1824) ranks alongside Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa in its importance, both in terms of its contemporary impact and enduring influence. This shows Ottoman soldiers rounding up men, women and children of Chios for slaughter or removal as slaves. It was purchased by the State for the handsome sum of six thousand francs, for exhibition among leading contemporary art in the Musée du Luxembourg in Paris. It remains unusual among history paintings for its highly contemporary theme: Delacroix completed and exhibited this at only his second Salon, just two years after the event, making it almost a work of reportage.

Three years later, he overstepped the mark in another huge painting based a little too loosely on Byron.

Delacroix departed considerably from Byron’s narrative to invite us to see The Death of Sardanapalus in a different light. With these scenes of carnage and destruction all around him, Sardanapalus rests, recumbent on his great divan. His face is mask-like, unmoved, and he stares coldly into the distance, his head propped by his right hand. All this is shown in brilliant colours dominated by the red of the king’s divan.

His reputation was rescued by the July Revolution of 1830. Although he took no part in the brief revolution, Delacroix seized the opportunity to capture its spirit in his major work for the next Salon, Liberty Leading the People (1830), the most famous painting of his entire career.

More conservative in its style and composition, at the apex of its pyramid is the tricolour, below which it’s largely formed by the figure of Liberty leading the revolutionaries on, over a base of fallen bodies. Although his vivid portrayal of fighting at the barricades was shocking, this earned him praise, and he was awarded the Legion of Honour. Once again, the State bought the painting from the Salon, but ironically decided that his message was too inflammatory to exhibit permanently to the public until more than a decade after his death.

The following year chance played another part in career and influence over Western painting, when he was invited to be official artist to a diplomatic mission to the chief sovereign of Morocco, although largely on the grounds of his social skills rather than his art. During his time in Morocco and Algiers he filled at least seven sketchbooks and many loose sheets with watercolours, annotations and other material that he was to use over the rest of his career.

Delacroix’s Women of Algiers in their Apartment is a complex hybrid from the watercolours and sketches made of local models during his visits to Morocco and Tangier, with studio work in Paris using a European model. The end result is harmonious, and makes exceptional use of light and colour, its fine details giving the image the air of complete authenticity. This proved the start of a long series of Orientalist paintings both by Delacroix and those whom it inspired over the following century and more, including the admiration of Paul Cézanne.

Until 1833, he had painted a few commissions for places of worship, but had otherwise concentrated on narrative easel works. That year he was commissioned to undertake his first project for a major state building, the decoration of the Salon du Roi of the Palais Bourbon, the seat of the French legislature.

Delacroix tried out fresco painting in preparation for this project, but wasn’t impressed by its results. He wanted to achieve a matte surface similar to that of a glue distemper, something he accomplished using a combination of oil paint with virgin wax dissolved in turpentine, in effect a form of encaustic paint. This was to prove his mainstay for all his subsequent wall painting.

He placed Justice over the location of the king’s throne in the Salon du Roi, where she reaches out over everyone, young and old, as the supreme power.

Among Delacroix’s more everyday narrative paintings, there are many innovations.

It was he who first seems to have realised the visual potential in Ophelia’s drowning in William Shakespeare’s play Hamlet. His first and almost monochrome painting of The Death of Ophelia in 1838 follows Queen Gertrude’s account of events in Act 4 Scene 7 of the play. In that, Ophelia climbed into a willow tree whose branch broke, dropping her into the stream below. Delacroix painted a more finished version of that in 1844, and another in 1853. By the last of those, John Everett Millais had painted his masterpiece of Ophelia, and many others were to follow where Delacroix had led.

Throughout the mature phase of his career, Delacroix had favourite and recurrent themes. He had a great love for Rubens’ paintings of wild animal hunts, and Géricault’s paintings of horses in motion. The one motif that he kept returning to linked back to The Raft of the Medusa, and manifested itself in paintings of the wreck of the Don Juan from Byron, or Christ on the Sea of Galilee, seen here in a version from about 1841.

As with some other great artists, Delacroix’s late works became more radical than his earlier paintings, with the exception of Sardanapalus. When he was fighting illness while trying to complete his last great wall paintings in the Church of Saint-Sulpice, Paris, he was commissioned to paint a series depicting the four seasons in allegorical form. He completed these shortly before his death on 13 August 1863.

Eurydice Bitten by a Serpent while Picking Flowers (Eurydice’s Death) shows the moment of tragedy following the marriage of Eurydice to Orpheus when she is bitten on the foot by a snake and dies. In the background Orpheus is clutching his lyre as he seeks his bride, who is gathering flowers on the right. In the foreground, she is collapsing and soon to die as Orpheus tries to steady her, and the dark snake makes its getaway on the right. The link with Spring appears to be flowers, thus Flora.

His style has become even richer in chroma, with loose and sketchy brushwork, as if anticipating the changes that were to come in the next decades.

The year before his death he brought an end to his long series of shipwrecks in Shipwreck off a Coast (1862). At last the survivors of the Don Juan, or perhaps Géricault’s Medusa, have made landfall, and one of them is being rescued in the left foreground.

A year after Delacroix’s death, Henri Fantin-Latour painted the first of his group portraits, Homage to Delacroix.

References

Wikipedia

Barthélémy Jobert (2018) Delacroix, new and expanded edn, Princeton UP. ISBN 978 0 691 18236 0.
Patrick Noon and Christopher Riopelle (2015) Delacroix and the Rise of Modern Art, National Gallery and Yale UP. ISBN 978 1 857 09575 3.
Lucy Norton (translator) (1995) The Journal of Eugène Delacroix, 3rd edn, Phaedon. ISBN 978 0 7148 3359 0.
Arlette Sérullaz (2004) Delacroix, Louvre Drawing Gallery, 5 Continents. ISBN 978 8 874 39105 9.
Beth S Wright (editor) (2001) The Cambridge Companion to Delacroix, Cambridge UP. ISBN 978 0 521 65077 1.