The Sphinx of Modern Painting

SÉBASTIEN ALLARD AND CÔME FABRE

“Fame Is Not an Empty Word”: 1822–32

On September 3, 1822, while staying with his brother Charles

Henry at Le Louroux, Eugène Delacroix (fig. 1) began keeping
a journal.¹ This initiative marked the anniversary of the death
of his “beloved mother” and also the occasion of his “present
triumph,” the exhibition of his first Salon painting, Dante
and Virgil in the Underworld, or The Barque of Dante, as it is
generally known, at the Musée du Luxembourg (fig. 2). The
canvas had been the subject of heated debate at the Salon of
1822. A handful of contemporaries admired it: Adolphe
Thiers, a young lawyer from Marseilles who had just arrived
in Paris and was hoping to make a name for himself by writing
reviews of the exhibition, praised it enthusiastically in Le
constitutionnel, a liberal, opposition newspaper. But most critics
did not understand the work, including the powerful critic
Etienne Jean Delécluze, who would remain antagonistic
toward Delacroix throughout his life. In Le moniteur universel,
Delécluze called the painting a tartouillade (a daub).²

FIG. 1Frédéric Villot (French, 1809–1875). Portrait of Eugène Delacroix

(after a Self-Portrait Drawing), 1847. Mezzotint and drypoint on paper,
image 63⁄8 x 43⁄16 in (16.2 x 10.7 cm); sheet 8¼ x 51⁄8 in. (21 x 13 cm).
Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris (inv. N2)

1
FIG. 2 The Barque of Dante (Dante and Virgil in the Underworld), 1822. Oil on canvas, 747⁄16 x 967⁄8 in. (189 x 246 cm). Musée du Louvre, Paris (3820) (J 100)

The state’s purchase of The Barque of Dante, arranged to the Louvre”; every painting exhibited there would be
by comte Auguste de Forbin, director of museums, meant that transferred to the Louvre upon its maker’s death. Delacroix,
the painting would enter the collection of the museum of who was barely twenty-four when the Barque entered the
living artists established in 1818 at the Palais du Luxembourg. collection in 1822, had just scored a major coup: although
Louis XVIII (r. 1814–24) intended the museum to fill the his career had hardly begun, he knew that after he died,
void left by the repatriation of works of art seized by French is art would be displayed on the walls of the Louvre, like
armies during the Napoleonic Wars. He wanted it to func- that of Raphael and Poussin. This prospect gratified him
tion as a symbol of both the glory of the French school and immensely. Not long after, he would write, “Fame is not
the munificence of royal patronage. This new museum—the an empty word for me. The sound of praise gives me
Musée du Luxembourg—was conceived as “the antechamber real happiness.”³

2 DELACROIX
“Pray to Heaven That I May Be a Great Man” notebooks: “Wednesday, March 29: day of gunfire.”⁸ With
the ensuing peace, his dreams of the military glory his broth-
Trained in the secondary schools of the French Empire, ers had known evaporated. What remained for him? His
where fame was considered the cardinal virtue, Delacroix mother’s death on September 3, 1814, left Delacroix and his
aspired to achieve it from his earliest years. He filled his sister utterly destitute. Indeed, Henriette had been forced to
student notebooks with variations on his signature that suggest leave Paris. He observed with sadness the decline of his
something beyond mere experiments in penmanship. Written brother, also near bankruptcy; “surrounded by roughnecks
in roman and gothic styles, in color, and as rebuses, the and riff-raff,” Charles was under pressure to conceal an extra-
inscriptions—“Delacroix,” “de La Croix,” “Della Croce”— marital affair with the daughter of a tavern keeper.⁹ The obli-
were sometimes preceded by an emphatic “Monsieur.” In gation to restore luster to the family name thus rested with
November 1815, he wrote to his friend Achille Piron: “Pray to Delacroix. It appears, then, that his desire for fame arose not
heaven that I may be a great man”—an entreaty that reveals his solely from social ambition or classical virtue, but also from an
preoccupation with fame from a very young age.⁴ acute historical consciousness.
Delacroix’s lineage was prestigious. His mother, born His uncle Henri François Riesener had secured him a
Victoire Oeben, was the daughter of the famous cabinetmaker place in the studio of Pierre Narcisse Guérin, probably in
Jean François Oeben; his uncle was the painter Henri François 1813, and there he became friends with Théodore Gericault.¹⁰
Riesener. Henri’s wife, the former Félicité Longrois, was a An artistic career was just one path among others that he
favorite aunt, and their son Léon (also a painter), would considered following to fulfill his destiny, and for a long time
become one of Delacroix’s closest friends (see cats. 88, 89). he hesitated. The startling beginning to his Journal, which
Delacroix’s father had been minister of foreign affairs under condensed in a few lines his first triumph and his mother’s
the Directory, and Delacroix often looked to him as a model.⁵ death, seems to have introduced unconsciously a causal rela-
His eldest brother, Charles Henry, a general and baron of the tionship, as if her death had ultimately determined the direc-
Empire, was made an honorary maréchal de camp, and his other tion he would take.
brother, Henri, died courageously at the Battle of Friedland in Whether or not this was so, Delacroix, intent on distin-
1807. Delacroix felt the need to distinguish himself, as indicated guishing himself, would take full advantage of the liberaliza-
by a letter to his sister, Henriette de Verninac, after The Barque tion of art institutions under the aegis of the comte de Forbin
of Dante was purchased at the Salon of 1822 when, referring to at the beginning of the Bourbon Restoration. He would
a laudatory review by Adolphe Thiers, he suggested: “[My also make the most of the Salon, the premier exhibition of
nephew] will be filled with pride for his uncle and will learn works by living artists, usually held biannually at the Louvre.¹¹
to respect one more great man.”⁶ However, his 1815 exhorta- His generation would learn to capitalize on the goodwill of
tion to Piron betrays a dual anxiety: that of failure and the an administration eager to support new talents and intent on
passage of time. He exclaimed, “Oh, we are very old and have reinforcing the dynamism of the “French school.” In 1816
seen many things!” adding: “I have plans. I would like to do Jacques Louis David, the father of that school, had fled to
something, but nothing has come into focus just yet.”⁷ Brussels as a regicide,¹² and the remaining masters, especially
Delacroix, born in 1798, belonged to the first generation David’s students Antoine Jean Gros, François Gérard, Anne
to experience the acceleration of history captured by Alfred Louis Girodet—and also Guérin—were beginning to show
de Musset, who was twelve years the artist’s junior, in La signs of weakness.¹³ In May 1821 Forbin wrote to his friend the
confession d’un enfant du siècle. Musset’s book was published painter François Marius Granet: “No one really knows what
in 1836, twenty years after the events—the triumph of the Gérard is doing. It’s always very mysterious, but he is polite
Empire, its glory and fall—that left an entire generation of and has lovely manners. Gros takes little interest in others; he
young people at loose ends, trapped between a reviled past is as well-mannered as ever. I leave him alone in his sad cor-
and an uncertain future, yet in a world where everything ner. Girodet has retired to the countryside and no longer
seemed possible. On March 29, 1814, the eve of the allied paints. Guérin is here, but he doesn’t do much anymore
forces’ entry into Paris, Delacroix, as if disillusioned by either. The young people will try very hard, and the Salon
Napoleon’s imminent defeat, wrote in one of his school will, I think, be very lively.”¹⁴

4 DELACROIX
 In 1821, Delacroix, although only a beginner, understood make a name for himself there. He may have been influenced
that the Salon scheduled for the following year was an oppor- by the example of friends and acquaintances. His master,
tunity to be seized. Having just failed to win the Prix de Guérin, though a great defender of the traditional path, had
Rome, he was troubled by a sense that time was slipping away. had his first success as a painter at the Salon of 1799 with The
As he explained to his sister: “I would be very proud . . . to Return of Marcus Sextus.²⁰ More recently, Théodore Gericault
have the time to do something for the next Salon. These and Ary Scheffer, students of Guérin’s and Delacroix’s class-
exhibitions are now so far apart that you can become old in mates, had won their spurs at the Salon of 1812 without having
the intervals between them . . . and it is good to win a bit of studied in Rome beforehand: Gericault with the Portrait of
recognition, if possible.”¹⁵ The urgency with which he threw Lieutenant M. D., later known as Officer of the Chasseurs
himself into the fray, although linked to his generation’s Commanding a Charge (Louvre); and Scheffer with Abel Singing
awareness of an acceleration of historical time, was also rooted a Hymn of Praise (location unknown).²¹ They were among the
in his financial woes. To earn money, Delacroix designed artists who were then adopting a new strategy of appealing
machines with his friend Charles-Louis-Raymond Soulier and directly to the public for approval before—or instead of—
drew liberal-leaning political cartoons—a rare occurrence of seeking official recognition, in the form of the Prix de Rome,
overtly political views in his oeuvre—for the satirical newspa- from their colleagues.²² This approach provoked a major
per Le miroir.¹⁶ He also obtained work as a fine artist. In 1819, a upheaval within the tradition-bound fine arts system. The
patron commissioned him to paint a Virgin for the church of turmoil, bolstered by the unprecedented rise of the press in
the village of Orcemont, near Paris, and in 1820 Gericault the early 1820s, was indeed felt at the Académie de France
subcontracted to him a commission from the Ministère de in Rome.
l’Intérieur for a Virgin of the Sacred Heart (see fig. 110). Finally, Although Delacroix would plan the specifics of his first
in autumn 1821, Delacroix completed the decoration for the Salon entry in an intelligent, pragmatic, and, above all, system-
dining room in the newly built mansion of the great actor atic manner, his reasons for submitting a painting to the exhi-
Talma. But his earnings from these projects fell short of his bition were not based on principle, even though his future
needs: his studies with Guérin and the Ecole des Beaux-Arts was at stake. In fact, it seems that he had not yet given up on
were costly, as were his materials, models, and the rental of the idea of eventually contending for the Prix de Rome.
scaffolding at the museum.¹⁷ To improve his finances, he Aware of his technical deficiencies, he even entertained the
hoped to secure a commission or purchase by the state at possibility of training in the studio of Antoine Jean Gros, who
the Salon. at that time had the highest reputation for preparing students
for the competitive exams.²³ Delacroix’s decision to “try his
luck,” as he told Soulier, at the Salon was that of a young man
1822: Trying His Luck in a hurry, hungry for recognition and driven by the need to
secure a commission or a purchase.²⁴ The gambit paid off
Under the auspices of the comte de Forbin, the Salon for brilliantly, with the state’s acquisition of The Barque of Dante
the first time opened its doors to young artists who had not and its exhibition in the Musée du Luxembourg at a time
necessarily followed the well-established course of study when not even Gericault or Gros had works displayed there.
culminating in the Prix de Rome competition. Even more Delacroix’s decision would determine the entire course of his
than others, Delacroix immediately understood the Salon’s career, not only his vocation as a painter but also his fondness
importance: “I would really like to do a painting for the next for exhibiting his works to the public. Delacroix would be
Salon, especially if it could get people to know me some- one of the few artists of his generation—Camille Corot was
what,” he wrote in 1821 to his friend Soulier, who was then in another—to put his reputation on the line by participating at
Naples.¹⁸ Delacroix had advised Soulier a few weeks earlier: the Salon until the very end of his career.
“Think about next year’s Salon. You must plaster it with your Delacroix skillfully prepared his submission to the Salon,
watercolors and oil paintings. That’s where you’ll really make probably guided by the successes and failures of Gericault at
yourself known.”¹⁹ In 1821 Delacroix declined to try again for the previous exhibitions. The subject of the painting was
the Prix de Rome in order to join the fray at the Salon and clearly of paramount importance in attracting attention among

“FAME IS NOT AN EMPTY WORD”: 1822–32 5

hundreds of works; an episode from Dante’s Divine Comedy, the “A Sublime Triviality That Thrills”
final choice, came after much deliberation. On September 15,
1821, Delacroix, still undecided about what he was going The choice of a subject inspired by Dante would prove tre-
to paint, wrote to Soulier: “I am proposing to do a painting for mendously effective. It is not known whether the idea was
the Salon, for which I will take as my subject the recent wars the artist’s alone or if it was suggested to him by a devotee of
of the Turks and the Greeks. I believe that under the circum- Italian literature, such as the painter François Gérard. At the
stances, if there is some merit in the execution, it would be a time, familiarity with The Divine Comedy was, for the most part,
way to set myself apart.”²⁵ In confiding this plan to his friend, superficial in France. Painters were acquainted with the story
Delacroix clearly expressed the hierarchical relationship of Ugolino and, consistent with the vogue for troubadour
between the subject and its execution. The standard by themes, the fateful love of Paolo and Francesca.³⁰ But Dante’s
which interest in the work would be measured was, in fact, its epic poem had been part of Delacroix’s cultural frame of
subject. A Greek subject would have addressed a highly vola- reference since his years at the lycée. In 1814, he had copied
tile and timely issue. In 1821, the Greek War of Independence passages from the poem into his school notebooks.³¹ In 1819 or
against the Ottoman Empire had only just begun. The French 1820, he made drawings in his notebooks inspired by the work
government prudently maintained an official policy of strict and attempted to translate parts of it.³² On September 28, 1819,
neutrality in order to retain ties with all interested parties, he wrote to his friend Félix Guillemardet: “Sometimes when I
including Russia. Moreover, because France’s liberal faction am in the middle of the hunt, [but] my enthusiasm for the prey
openly sided with the Greeks, the Restoration government, has waned, I remember Ugolino, whom I had the presence of
which had just responded to the conspiracy of the Carbonari, mind to bring with me.”³³ Delacroix wavered about which
was deeply anxious about the Greek independence move- episode to illustrate before finally turning his attention to the
ment. The risk, therefore, was that such a subject would be moment in canto 8 when Dante, guided by Virgil in Phlegyas’s
seen as a provocation. boat, crosses the river to the Underworld.³⁴ He suddenly
In 1822 Delacroix, though of a liberal bent, wanted recognizes, amid the damned attempting to board the boat
primarily to make a name for himself and secure a commission (cat. 6), the wrathful Filippo Argenti, condemned to devour
or a purchase. He knew the risks, having before him the himself. In the background, the infernal city of Dis is burning.
example of Gericault’s controversial Raft of the Medusa,²⁶ In choosing to illustrate a little-known passage from The
exhibited in 1819. He may also have listened to the advice of Divine Comedy, Delacroix proposed a reformulation of certain
others, including Forbin, who scoured studios looking for principles of Neoclassical painting. With The Return of Marcus
young talent. Aside from the possibility of an immediate Sextus, his master Guérin had done the same, albeit inspired
scandal, there was another risk. Given the uncertainty of the by classical tragedy filtered through the lens of Racine. In the
times, even if the work were purchased by the state, it might 1820s, however, Delacroix’s source, The Divine Comedy, was
never hang in the Luxembourg owing to the vagaries of poli- not only unconventional but also partly transgressive. Trying
tics. Most of the great masters active under the Empire— his hand at translating the story of Ugolino, Delacroix con-
Gros, above all— continued to pay a political price.²⁷ fided to Guillemardet: “[It] is extraordinarily difficult. In the
Delacroix therefore abandoned his initial idea of a sub- original, there is a sublime triviality that thrills. The style drags
ject from contemporary history in favor of illustrating canto 8 as if to make you spend those six deadly days with Ugolino.”³⁵
of Dante’s Inferno. That decision was made in late autumn The expression “sublime banality” aptly conveys what
1821. Because the Salon was set to open on April 24, 1822, Delacroix was trying to achieve in his painting, seemingly
the artist, as would be his habit, worked relentlessly and with anticipating by five years Victor Hugo’s preface to Cromwell.³⁶
the utmost urgency, for as many as thirteen hours a day. In The Romantic generation to which Delacroix belonged, having
February, he wrote to his sister: “I am overwhelmed with grown up in a world both glorious and violent, could not fail
work. If I manage to pull off what I am undertaking, I will have to respond to the terribilità of The Inferno. The return of peace
done a rather substantial painting in only two months, one to Europe allowed for the dissemination and vogue for British
that might contribute toward making me well known.”²⁸ gothic novels in France, and Delacroix read Dante in the
The painting was finished on April 15 (see fig. 2).²⁹ light of these works. He devoured Matthew Gregory Lewis’s

8 DELACROIX
 CAT. 6 Studies of a Damned Man, for “The Barque of Dante,” 1822

Monk, which combines eroticism, spellbinding supernatural- at the Salons during the Revolution. Like those heroes of
ism, and fiendish visions. He copied excerpts from the French antiquity, Dante is accompanied by a guide, Virgil. And yet
translation of 1799 into his notebooks. The novel even Dante’s status in the poem turns the notion of the hero on its
inspired a poem he wrote in the early 1820s, at a time when head. The hierarchical relationship between classical charac-
he was rereading, translating, and illustrating Dante.³⁷ ters and their guides is abandoned: Dante and Virgil are treated
The Inferno’s episode taking as its subject Filippo Argenti, as equals. The hero is thus split in two, a Romantic theme par
which features a medieval hero, hellish clouds and dark waters, excellence that recurs in Delacroix’s early works, such as in
burning cities, and the damned devouring one another, moan- the series of scenes from Goethe’s Faust (see cats. 36–56). In
ing and screaming, was at odds with the ideal of balance pro- the center of the canvas, Delacroix placed Virgil’s hand grasp-
pounded by Neoclassical painting. It also introduced a new ing Dante’s, a kind of modern equivalent of the Neoclassical
type of hero, one who is neither isolated nor triumphant. gesture of the oath. The oath, which conveys collective,
Delacroix captured Dante in a moment of doubt or hesitation, unifying, and socially hierarchized values, as in David’s Oath
as he witnesses a scene, apparently terrifying, located outside of the Horatii (1784; Musée du Louvre), is replaced in The
the frame. That space beyond the frame, which the painter Barque of Dante by the gesture of friendship, based on the free
invoked regularly in his early paintings, stimulates the imagina- consent of individuals. In a climate of equality, friendship
tion and elicits a new level of involvement on the part of the links concern for the self with concern for the other.
spectator.³⁸ This is the famous “bridge” Delacroix would later During these years, Delacroix’s correspondence is
speak of between the minds of the painter and the beholder. filled with such ardent declarations addressed to Jean-Baptiste
Dante, exiled from his own country and wandering in Pierret: “I am happy, really happy, only when I’m with a
the Underworld, brings to mind the peregrinations of friend”;³⁹ “Most holy friendship, divine friendship, dear heart!
Oedipus, Belisarius, and Homer, who were often represented No, I am not worthy of you. You swathe me in your friendship.

“FAME IS NOT AN EMPTY WORD”: 1822–32 9

 FIG. 3 A Gathering of Friends on Saint Sylvester’s Day (New Year’s, 1817–18). From the so- called Saint Sylvester’s Day Sketchbook, folios
31 verso and 32 recto, 1817–18. Ink and wash on paper, overall 913⁄16 x 15¾ in. (25 x 40 cm). Musée du Louvre, Paris (RF 9140)

You are my conqueror, I am your captive. Good friend, truly Monsieur Delacroix Shows “Promise of Real Talent”
you know how to love.”⁴⁰ In the context of a new society that
would highlight horizonal structures (generational, artistic), Dante and Virgil, an entirely original subject, allowed the
personal feelings were coupled with social practice, as indicated young painter to engage visitors to the Salon through a series of
in a depiction of the traditional New Year’s Eve celebration, A familiar associations. The boat and the cannibalism among the
Gathering of Friends on Saint Sylvester’s Day (New Year’s, 1817–18) damned in the foreground evoked for his contemporaries
(fig. 3). In this drawing, Delacroix, Pierret, Guillemardet, and Gericault’s Raft of the Medusa, which had caused a scandal at
Piron are shown gathered by the fire, drinking, conversing, the previous Salon. Some pointed this out, including Arnold
and enjoying music. On the left-hand page, each has signed his Scheffer (brother of the painter Ary), who wrote several years
name and, three years after the fall of the Empire, given his date later: “In that first work, imitating the manner of Gericault,
of birth according to the Revolutionary calendar. Delacroix, M. Delacroix showed promise of real talent but not the origi-
therefore, is shown to have been born on “the 9th of Floréal, nality that now marks his works.”⁴² The painting’s literary
Year 6 of the French Republic, one and indivisible”—as indi- subject allowed the artist to avoid political risks, which
visible as their friendship, symbolized by the handshake that Gericault himself had mitigated by giving his Raft the generic
dominates the page. The same gesture unites Virgil and Dante title “Shipwreck Scene” in the Salon catalogue, or livret, of
in a shared fate and an initiation of sorts. The reference to the 1819. The associations with Dante and Gericault called forth a
Revolutionary calendar in the midst of the Restoration, like third figure: Michelangelo. Evidence of that connection can
Delacroix’s use, in a letter to Piron written sometime after the be found in Delacroix’s attempted translation of canto 3,
Battle of Waterloo, of the “patriotic or revolutionary paper, devoted to the barque of Charon, recorded in one of his
however you want to interpret it,” reveals the liberal, which is to notebooks and illustrated on the right-hand page with a
say Bonapartist, ideas that united the four friends at the time.⁴¹ drawing inspired in almost every detail by Michelangelo’s

10 DELACROIX
Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel.⁴³ Both the medieval poet through Gros’s example, expressed the new polarity in his
and the Renaissance master gave expression to dark, dramatic mind between inventiveness in the classic sense of the term
inspiration. The moderns did so also, sometimes at the and craft, between inspiration and the materiality of paint. In
expense of form and with a certain immoderation. The critic 1824 Delacroix would express that polarity differently: “It
Delécluze pointed this out in one of his first articles for Le would be a singular and very beautiful thing to bring together
moniteur universel, in which he attempted to define the essence the styles of Michelangelo and Velázquez.”⁴⁶
of modern poetry—that is, poetry written since “that great rift The composition of The Barque of Dante was probably
in the arts brought about by Dante and Michelangelo.” He inspired not only by The Landing of Maria de Medici at Marseilles
contrasted the moderns, who, beginning with those two but also by Rubens’s Hero and Leander (1604; Yale University
figures, had emphasized expressiveness, to the ancients, who, Art Gallery), which Delacroix would have known through a
considering beauty the aim of art, had cultivated form. The large drawing by Lucas Vorsterman (ca. 1619; Musée du
critic, a former student of David’s and a defender of the Grand Louvre).⁴⁷ From his study of the Maria de Medici cycle,
Tradition, noted that “our painting was supposed to be Delacroix learned the science of depicting flesh tones and
expressive.” At the same time, “in the interest of truth and reflections as well as the rational division of form into its colored
art,” he cautioned against “misusing that resource [expressive- components without the use of chiaroscuro. Contrary to what
ness], which leads . . . imperceptibly to exaggeration and the his assistant Pierre Andrieu would later claim, it is not possible
neglect of indispensable studies in the arts of imitation.”⁴⁴ to detect in the drops of water on the bodies of the damned
With its dark subject, craggy faces, and the damned with their the first hints of “optical mixture”; but Delacroix did express
bloodshot eyes, The Barque of Dante obviously privileged in the Salon painting his understanding of the importance of
expressiveness. Delécluze, though an expert on The Divine reflections for bringing color to life. “Delacroix had a very hard
Comedy, therefore violently denounced Delacroix’s painting, time rendering in all their natural truth the drops of water
calling it a tartouillade. falling from the overturned nude figures,” wrote the artist-
manqué-turned- collector Alfred Bruyas. “These drops of water
set him off on a search. The memory of Rubens’s sirens in The
A Real Tartouillade Landing of Maria de Medici at Marseilles and the study of the
gradations of the rainbow were his starting point.”⁴⁸ But where
In the idiom of the studio, a tartouillade was a weakly drawn Rubens displayed an economy of means by using the color of
painting in which everything was sacrificed to the brilliance of the sirens’ flesh as local color, Delacroix, who was also trying
the colors. It is true that in his first Salon painting, Delacroix to avoid black shadows, made use of a riot of colors: light is
supplemented his allusion to Michelangelo’s terribilità with, rendered by a brilliant white, gray tones by a green; reflections
in Thiers’s words, “the fecundity of Rubens.”⁴⁵ The young are conveyed with a yellowish dab, and the shadow by a red.
painter belonged to the first generation of artists able to train Delacroix’s extraordinary richness and chromatic inventiveness
with relative freedom at the museum—that is to say, the are already summed up in these few square inches of canvas,
Louvre—directly in contact with the old masters, without the enlivened by the large red accent of Dante’s hood, contrasted
filter of academic teaching. In the early 1820s, Delacroix was with its complementary color, the green of his mantle.
fond of copying Peter Paul Rubens, especially the Nereids in Wishing to attract attention by impressing the public,
The Landing of Maria de Medici at Marseilles (fig. 4), as seen Delacroix balanced the boldness of a dark subject, the dra-
in the great study at the Kunstmuseum Basel (see cat. 5). He matic intensity of gesture and color, and the horrifying aspect
knew only a few sculptures by Michelangelo firsthand, and of the figures trying to board the boat through a display of
they could have been of use to him only through the force of beaux morceaux (beautifully rendered passages) in what consti-
their invention. By contrast, the works of the Antwerp master tuted the academic exercise par excellence: the nude. That is
were for Delacroix the essence of painting, and he sought to probably what led Gros to say that the painting was “Rubens
understand their mechanisms by observing and copying them. refined.”⁴⁹ Delacroix distributed these passages in the fore-
The tension between Michelangelo’s influence, partly filtered ground, as a garland subtending the Dante-Virgil group. The
through Gericault, and that of Rubens, apprehended in part rather ostentatious device allowed him to demonstrate his skill

“FAME IS NOT AN EMPTY WORD”: 1822–32 11

in combining references to antiquity—Phlegyas’s back, for
example, inspired by the Belvedere Torso—with a certain
realism in the rendering of the flesh, with bodies folded up or
splayed out in the extreme. Thiers was not mistaken in his
enthusiasm for the artist who “throws down his figures,
groups them, and bends them to his will with the boldness
of Michelangelo and the fecundity of Rubens. I’m not sure
which memory of the great artists takes hold of me as I look at
that painting.”⁵⁰ The frieze-like composition, which focuses
attention on the foreground, probably allowed the artist to
circumvent the difficulty he still had in defining space. The
reason for this difficulty was his reliance on live models while
building up his compositions. In the second part of his career,
he would try to dispense with their physical presence, believ-
ing that having the model before his eyes during the execution
of a painting obstructed the idealizing function of memory. In
the 1820s, by contrast, the use of a model seemed a way of
liberating himself from the constraints of academic teaching.
But let there be no mistake about the meaning of his
painting of 1822, which is sometimes considered year 1 of the
Romantic revolution. The young Delacroix was not wittingly
engaged in undermining pedagogical fundamentals or
Neoclassical principles. Did he not wish to study under Gros,
the (overly) faithful student of David? And for his part, did
not Gros, though an intransigent guardian of his master’s
teaching, try to attract the novice painter to his studio? Would
not Delacroix’s canvas, though judged imperfect (this was
normal for a beginner), be almost unanimously admired as
heralding a master? Unlike Ingres, whose talent was nurtured
in David’s studio and who, in 1806, said that “art needs to be FIG. 4 Peter Paul Rubens (Flemish, 1577–1640). The Landing of Maria
reformed,” Delacroix did not want to be “that particular revolu- de Medici at Marseilles on November 3, 1600, ca. 1622–25. Oil on canvas,
12 ft. 111⁄8 in. x 9 ft. 81⁄8 in. (3.9 x 3 m). Musée du Louvre, Paris (1774)
tionary” who would carry out reform.⁵¹ His primary objective
was to make a name for himself. And yet, even while following
in the footsteps of his more or less distant predecessors,
remaining at heart a man of his time faithful to the principles importance he attributed to a painting’s subject and its execu-
of the grand genre, he systematically shifted and reformulated tion.⁵³ Delacroix’s originality lay in reassessing and accepting
his positions, at least somewhat aware of the polarity between the execution as “nobly” constitutive of the creative process;
the ideal aspect of his art and its material composition. in that, he broke with almost three centuries of painting,
In his early years, Delacroix was preoccupied with the defined as primarily cosa mentale, or ut pictura poesis. On May 11,
apparent contradiction of the aspiration for immateriality 1824, he lamented, “How I would like to be a poet!” Then,
existing within an art form produced by the materiality of paint correcting himself, he wrote, “But at least create in paint-
deposited on canvas by an artist’s hand, that “good, fat color” ing.”⁵⁴ Two years earlier, in an important passage he would
that he wanted to spread “thickly over a brown or red can- revisit several times in the Journal of his later years, he laid the
vas.”⁵² This tension, which runs through a significant part of foundations for what distinguishes the painter’s art from that
his early Journal, found its concrete expression in the relative of the poet, namely, its relationship to materiality: “The art of

12 DELACROIX
 CAT. 5 Nereid, after Rubens, detail from “The Landing of Maria de Medici at Marseilles,” ca. 1822

the painter is all the nearer to man’s heart because it seems artist’s manner in particular. It was as if contemporaries found
to be more material.”⁵⁵ The subtler critics, such as Delécluze, something repellent in an execution that was, in their view,
quickly understood the danger; the insulting tartouillade too conspicuous, as if it prevented them from seeing the subject
expressed exactly that: a formless form devoid of ideas. The represented. Gros, who in 1822 had applauded Delacroix’s
violent attacks to which Delacroix would be subjected at good fortune, two years later looked upon the artist’s Scenes
the Salons of 1824 and, especially, 1827 would take aim at the from the Massacres at Chios (fig. 5) as the massacre of painting.

“FAME IS NOT AN EMPTY WORD”: 1822–32 13

 CAT. 35 A Greek and a Turk in an Interior, late 1820s

The Muse and the Market massacred inhabitants of the island of Scio, now Chios,
and sold several thousand men, women, and children into
Emboldened by his first success, Delacroix decided to exhibit slavery in the principal cities of the empire. These killings
at the following Salon, which was set to open in August 1824. and deportations caused a wave of outrage in the West.
On May 24 or 31, 1823, he recorded in his Journal the subject They were conveyed in numerous accounts, one by Olivier
of the principal painting he would display: “I have decided Voutier, a French colonel in the service of the Greeks and the
to paint scenes from the massacres of Chios for the Salon.”⁵⁶ discoverer of the Venus de Milo in 1820. Voutier’s Mémoires
The artist thus returned to an episode from the Greek War du Colonel Voutier sur la guerre actuelle des Grecs was published
of Independence, a subject that he had abandoned in 1821. in 1823. Delacroix moved in philhellenic circles, as did his
His earlier remark, “I believe that under the circumstances, nephew, Charles de Verninac, who introduced the artist to
if there is some merit in the execution, it would be a way to Voutier on January 12, 1824, the same day Delacroix noted
set myself apart,” would prove to be prescient with regard that he was “really” beginning his painting. Its composition
to both the content and the role of the subject in attracting had been interrupted in November 1823, and its long and
attention.⁵⁷ He chose one of the most terrible episodes in painstaking execution would keep him occupied throughout
the war, one that had made a strong impact on Europeans the spring.⁵⁸
owing to the profusion of dreadful details about it that had The artist’s sincere interest in the Greeks who were
circulated in the press. In the spring of 1822, Ottoman troops trying to liberate themselves from the Ottomans is beyond

FIG. 5 Scenes from the Massacres at Chios, 1824. Oil on canvas, 13 ft. 83⁄16 in. x
11 ft. 73⁄8 in. (4.2 x 3.5 m). Musée du Louvre, Paris (3823) (J 105)

“FAME IS NOT AN EMPTY WORD”: 1822–32 15

 CAT. 23 Charles VI and Odette de Champdivers, ca. 1825

doubt: many traces are found in 1821 to 1823, and throughout people, following the example of the British poet-adventurer
the decade (see, for example, cat. 35). It is worth noting, Lord Byron, were caught up in philhellenic enthusiasm.
however, that he acted with a great deal of discernment in Delacroix had made a name for himself: his Barque of Dante
postponing the execution of his idea for a subject taken from had been purchased by the state and was on public display
contemporary history. By 1824, though the official French at the Musée du Luxembourg alongside works by widely
position was still not decided, there was reason to hope that acknowledged masters such as Joseph Marie Vien and David.
the country would side with the Greeks. The conflict, which Emboldened by this recognition, he could now brave the
had lasted three years, was on everyone’s mind, and young potentially polemical character of a topical subject.

16 DELACROIX
 CAT. 24 The Duke of Orléans Showing His Lover, ca. 1825–26

Perhaps there was even a pointed interest in his doing so. Gericault sale,” he confided in his Journal.⁵⁹ Sometimes he just
With the liberalization of institutions, the art market had become wanted to relax: “Instead of another fairly large painting, I
considerably more complex; potentially, there were private should like to do several small paintings, but enjoy myself while
buyers for his work. Delacroix, who had to make the most of his painting them.”⁶⁰ Then, aware of the time he considered having
initial success, was keenly aware of this. Even as he was working wasted on bread-and-butter jobs, he pulled himself together:
on his large piece for the Salon, he made several dozen small “No more Don Quixotes and things unworthy of you.
paintings for private patrons, often for financial reasons. “[I] Concentrate deeply when you are painting and think only of
want to do small paintings, especially to buy something at the Dante. In his works lie what I have always felt within myself.”⁶¹

“FAME IS NOT AN EMPTY WORD”: 1822–32 17

 Delacroix was alluding here to Don Quixote in His Library Rochefoucauld, the intractable director of fine arts, who was
(1824; Tokyo Fuji Art Museum). But the contrast between that indignant about the breach of protocol: “I had the honor of
painting and two of the most beautiful of his small canvases is proposing more promptly than usual that you acquire the
striking. Charles VI and Odette de Champdivers (cat. 23) and paintings . . . to prevent these works, all of them remarkable,
The Duke of Orléans Showing His Lover (cat. 24) were painted from being purchased by individuals who would establish
somewhat later, about 1825, after his return from a trip to themselves as patrons of the arts only to assail the government
England. They are identical in format, and they function with a reproach as commonplace as it is unfair, namely, that
formally and iconographically as pendants. Both illustrate it was not encouraging the arts.”⁶³ Was the clever Forbin’s
episodes from medieval history as recounted in literature, in quibble intended to legitimize the acquisition? And did
particular, Pierre de Bourdeille Brantôme’s Les vies des dames Forbin mean to extricate himself from a difficult situation or
galantes. These brilliantly painted and intensely colored from real danger?⁶⁴ Whatever the case, the episode aptly
works, their material effects rendered in virtuoso fashion, illustrates the competition between the state and the market.
appealed to admirers of minor historical subjects whose tastes Given that Delacroix created a work for the Salon with
had been shaped by the troubadour paintings of the Empire. the idea that its purchase would remedy his financial situation
Delacroix was inspired in this vein by his friend Richard and, above all, secure his standing, it is highly probable
Parkes Bonington, who was producing this very kind of paint- that he gave some thought to the private market. In view of
ing at the time. For collectors, the licentiousness of The Duke Forbin’s haste to acquire Massacres at Chios as soon as the
of Orléans Showing His Lover would have enhanced its appeal: Salon opened—probably before the controversy got out of
the duke, uncovering the lower half of his mistress’s body hand—one may legitimately ask whether and to what extent
while concealing the rest, exhibits her to her husband, who the sympathetic official might have advised Delacroix. The
fails to recognize her. There may have been personal reminis- fact remains that the strategy implemented by the artist was,
cences behind the painting: in 1822–23, Delacroix shared once again, remarkably effective. The painting, exhibited at
a mistress, Madame Louise Rossignol de Pron, with his the Salon’s opening and purchased shortly thereafter by the
friend Soulier. museum administration, was the object of everyone’s attention
The evolving private art market, over which the state had and elicited particularly violent reactions.
little control, was not only for small paintings. In particular, as
Elisabeth Fraser has shown, the duc d’Orléans (the future king
Louis-Philippe), with his semipublic gallery at the Palais Scenes from the Massacres at Chios
Royal, was making his mark as a collector of the most modern
expressions of contemporary art.⁶² Might Delacroix, who in In elaborating a contemporary subject on a monumental scale,
1828 would receive a commission from the duke for Cardinal the painter reminded spectators of the scandal caused by
Richelieu Saying Mass in the Chapel of the Palais-Royal (destroyed Théodore Gericault’s Raft of the Medusa at the Salon of 1819.
in 1848), have hoped for the duke’s patronage if the state Yet few Salon critics concerned themselves with the work’s
refused to purchase Massacres at Chios? One indication sug- subject matter. Conversely, its execution was denounced so
gests that he did. Despite the scandal caused by the unveiling vehemently that Massacres at Chios soon came to be called a
of Massacres at Chios at the Salon, the comte de Forbin, disre- “massacre of painting.” It is not incidental that this epithet may
garding administrative procedure and without awaiting the have originated with Gros, whom Delacroix would describe
king’s signature, arranged to have the state purchase that in 1846, in an article on the painter Pierre Paul Prud’hon, as
painting and a few others not after the Salon ended, as custom “that son of Rubens who had the sad courage to hold out
required, but as it opened. Granted, King Louis XVIII was in a against all the magic toward which he was secretly inclined.”⁶⁵
very bad way. It is therefore possible that Forbin, as the direc- Delacroix, for his part, boldly confronted the expressive
tor of museums and an ardent supporter of youthful innova- power of the paint, which he had discovered, at least in part,
tion, wished to speed up the works’ acquisition in anticipation in Gros and in Rubens.
of Charles X’s accession to the throne. Forbin responded The massacre of Chios became the massacre of painting.
somewhat impertinently to the vicomte Sosthènes de La The semantic slippage from the painting’s subject to its form

18 DELACROIX
reduced the public’s apprehension of the painting to its mate- recalled memories of Gros’s Napoleon Visiting the Plague Victims
riality, the dimension Delacroix had pondered constantly of Jaffa (1804; Musée du Louvre), a painting withdrawn
while painting it. As Marie Mély-Janin exclaimed in horror, from public view during the Bourbon Restoration because it
“Everything here is harsh, coarse, rocky, rough, scruffy. Is it depicted Bonaparte, but which Delacroix had probably seen
paint, or is it glue or putty? . . . Monsieur Delacroix rushes on a visit to Gros’s studio at the close of the Salon of 1822.⁷²
headlong without rules, without moderation; he piles on the The vagueness of the perceived plague theme may have
color, he paints with a housepainter’s brush.”⁶⁶ The critic’s diminished the political value of Delacroix’s canvas. Thiers
vocabulary echoed the very words Delacroix had used when explained that the confusion regarding the painting’s subject
describing the painting in his Journal a few weeks earlier. The stemmed from the artist’s failure to depict the right moment,
severity of the attack indicates the degree to which the paint- that of the massacre itself. In rejecting unity of action, he did
ing appeared shocking and transgressive to the artist’s contem- not “compose a principal scene.” “M. Delacroix attempted to
poraries. In 1824 his position was too radical to be easily rival the randomness of nature. He therefore threw down his
understood. The critics, taken aback by the display of form, characters here and there, and no one knows how they could
the large brushstrokes, the surface effects, the extraordinary be in the place where they are.”⁷³ Although the work’s con-
richness of color, and the abundant impasto in the foreground, struction may have seemed faulty at the time, Thiers put his
did not make the connection—the famous “bridge”—between finger on one of the strong points of the painting as it is now
the harshness of the technique and the horror of the subject. perceived: the viewer’s brutal confrontation with the spread-
Nonetheless, Delacroix invited them to do so in the entry he out bodies, which form a kind of wall across the bottom third
wrote for the Salon catalogue: “Scenes of the massacres of of the canvas. Their pain and the manner in which they are
Chios. Greek families awaiting death or slavery (see the vari- painted stand in contradiction to the vast landscape that fills
ous accounts and newspapers of the time).” Going against the the remaining two-thirds of the composition.
conventions of Neoclassical history painting, he rejected the The critic Charles Paul Landon expressed this view with
use of dramatic argument, painting what in the language of utter clarity: “Instead of a carefully organized composition
the theater is called a tableau, rather than a scene.⁶⁷ Viewers conforming to [accepted] artistic principles, one finds only a
must allow themselves to be won over by sensations engen- confused assemblage of figures, or rather half-figures, since
dered by an intentionally chaotic technique. The critic none is developed completely. And the scene is so thoroughly
Auguste Chauvin felt this in spite of himself. Like Mély-Janin, obstructed that one does not glimpse the possibility of pene-
he launched a diatribe against the canvas, condemning the trating beyond the foreground.”⁷⁴ That effect, already percep-
“barbaric painter whose out- of- control imagination gives birth tible in The Barque of Dante, stems in part from the way the
only to hideous wounds, contortions, agony, and who is artist conceived his painting on the basis of models rather than
always afraid he won’t spill enough blood or cause enough adhering to a strictly defined composition. In fact, the rigid
agony.”⁶⁸ Blinded by his disgust for the work, did Chauvin figures seem to be juxtaposed: highly differentiated in typol-
really look at the composition? In fact, the artist showed ogy, age, and even skin color, they correspond to iconographic
almost nothing of the horror of the battles, which take place topoi (mother and child, lovers, two children, an old woman).
in the distance, in a radiant landscape. What horror is shown It is as if the bodies’ presence should suffice to tell the story:
is conveyed entirely by the materiality of the painting; it lies in an individual hero, such as the one Delacroix had considered
the viewer’s imagination, sparked by the absence of narration. painting in 1821, is no longer needed. At the same time, the
No analysis of the work can separate the subject from the relationship between individual and collective histories is
execution, as was done in Neoclassical criticism: the subject played out in the tension between the topos, which gives rise
resides largely in the execution.⁶⁹ to discrete, personal stories, and the stereotypical character of
Many did not understand Massacres at Chios and, like the figures. Yet, this tension, which results in part from
Stendhal and Thiers, likened it to a plague scene. “This work Delacroix’s method of developing the composition directly
always seems to me a painting intended to represent a plague,” from the model, obstructs the narrative, as Thiers observed.
Stendhal wrote.⁷⁰ Thiers noted that “everyone without excep-
tion has taken this massacre for a plague.”⁷¹ This association Following pages: FIG. 5 Scenes from the Massacres at Chios, 1824, detail

“FAME IS NOT AN EMPTY WORD”: 1822–32 19

“Dolce Chiavatura” role merely of a fragment of reality to be transfigured on the
canvas. “Today I drew and painted in the head and breast, etc.
If we follow the genesis of Massacres at Chios as it is recorded of the dead woman in the foreground.” He added: “I again
in Delacroix’s Journal, we find that models were, in fact, its had la mia chiavatura dinanzi colla mia carina Emilia. It in no
inspiration and, as with The Barque of Dante, that the work was way dampened my enthusiasm. You have to be young for this
elaborated from them. Although the artist executed a water- kind of life. Everything is now painted in except for the hand
color study setting out the main lines of the composition and the hair.”⁷⁶ Delacroix used the term chiavatura to refer to
(fig. 6), he proceeded to paint it figure by juxtaposed figure, sexual intercourse. Although artists often had such relations
with the model before his eyes each time. Delacroix began with models, for Delacroix, while he was working on Massacres
the painting in earnest on Monday, January 12, 1824. On at Chios, there was a close connection between erotic relation-
January 18, he noted, “Yesterday, Saturday, and the day before ships and artistic creation. Their inextricability is conveyed
yesterday, Friday, did part of the woman front and center or even in the way he relates the episode, which is far from an
the preliminaries for her. . . . I had a certain Provost, a model, isolated event. The reference to sex appears without transition
on Tuesday the 13th, and began with the head of the dying in the middle of the description of his work, as if painting the
man front and center.”⁷⁵ On Sunday, February 29, he wrote: hair and the hands, among the most sensual of anatomical
“did the other young man in the corner, based on little details, were the direct consequence of the sexual act.
Nassau, and gave him three francs.” On April 27, he painted Delacroix needed to possess his models in order to paint them.
the dead woman and her child based on “Mme Clément and On January 26, he saw Emilie again: “For three studio
her child.” And so on. The entry of January 24 is particularly sessions I gave Emilie Robert twelve francs . . . I had a nice
interesting because it shows that the model did not play the chiavata.”⁷⁷ And on March 3, he wrote: “Emilie dropped in
for a moment and I took full advantage; this made me feel a
little better. Work hard at your picture. Think about Dante.
Reread him. Shake a leg, keep at it to keep your mind on great
ideas. How will I profit from my near-solitude if I have only
commonplace ideas?”⁷⁸ And five days later: “did the head and
torso of the young girl attached to the horse.—Dolce chiava-
tura.”⁷⁹ On April 18, he mentioned a woman named Laure and
once again associated his ardor for his work with the expres-
sion of sexual desire, which vanished at the end of the session:
“At the studio by nine. Laure came. Made progress on the
portrait. It is strange that, having desired her all during the
session, as she was leaving, in quite a hurry actually, it wasn’t
quite the same. I suppose I needed time to collect myself.”⁸⁰
On April 20, he mentioned a certain Hélène: “The girl came
this morning to pose. Hélène slept or pretended to. I don’t
know why I stupidly thought I had to act like an admirer. But
no attraction there. I used the excuse of a headache. . . . As
she was leaving and it was too late, the wind had changed.”⁸¹
This description brings to mind a study of a reclining nude
(cat. 18): first identified—but without evidence—by Alfred
Robaut as Mlle Rose, she could be the sleeping Hélène.
Again on May 28, Delacroix wrote: “In the last few days
Study for Scenes from the Massacres at Chios, 1823/24. Graphite,
FIG. 6
I have resumed my painting wholeheartedly. I worked on
watercolor, and gouache on paper, 133⁄8 x 1113⁄16 in. (34 x 30 cm). Musée adjusting the dead woman. To a woman who came with a
du Louvre, Paris (RF 3717 recto) child—one franc. In the morning Laure came; she and the

22 DELACROIX
 CAT. 18 Reclining Female Nude: Back View, ca. 1824–26

chiavatura—five fr.—Also yesterday, another with la nera.”⁸²

The magnificent watercolor depicting an unmade bed (fig. 7),
which refers both to the pose and to the sexual encounter, is
the symbol of that dual relationship with the model. She is a
source of inspiration and also an object of desire, or a source
of inspiration inasmuch as she is an object of desire.
An evolution had occurred in Delacroix’s conception of
the nude from the time of his formative years to his recent,
more personal works. The earliest studies, some of which
were probably executed in Guérin’s studio, respect the proto-
col of the academy figure frozen in a conventional, at times
rhetorical pose (cat. 1).⁸³ Mademoiselle Rose (see cat. 2),
viewed frontally, is seated with her ankles crossed; she rests
her upper body on her left arm; her other arm is raised. The Unmade Bed, ca. 1825–28. Graphite, watercolor, and brown wash on
FIG. 7
model’s right arm was undoubtedly supported by a rope to paper, 7¼ x 11¾ in. (18.5 x 29.9 cm). Musée du Louvre, Paris (RF 31720)

“FAME IS NOT AN EMPTY WORD”: 1822–32 23

 CAT. 1 Male Academy Figure: Half-Length, Side View, ca. 1818–20

enable her to hold the pose. The figure’s face is shown in

profile, her eyes modestly lowered. By contrast, in the studies
Delacroix did in his own studio, he depicted the desire and
sexual availability of half- dressed women, often with their
breasts exposed, facing the painter (fig. 8).
The distinctive presence of the model in Delacroix’s early
works, though it may sometimes undermine the painting’s unity,
as Landon remarked, is much more significant than it appears at
first glance. During those years, the model was the fulcrum
around which the artist was able to revitalize history painting by
challenging Neoclassical composition. Within the Neoclassical
system, the idea had primacy. Once the idea for a painting had
been established, the artist would copy works of antiquity and
works by the masters before bringing his composition to life
FIG. 8 Female Nude Reclining on a Divan, or Woman with White Stockings,
by means of a live model. Conversely, Delacroix began with
ca. 1825–26. Oil on canvas, 10¼ x 13 in. (26 x 33 cm). Musée du Louvre, the model, then saw how he would compose the work. This
Paris (RF 1657) (J 7) was the method he used for The Barque of Dante (fig. 2).

24 DELACROIX
 CAT. 7 Head of an Old Greek Woman, 1824 FIG. 9Orphan Girl in the Cemetery, 1824. Oil on canvas, 2513⁄16 x 217⁄16 in.
(65.5 x 54.5 cm). Musée du Louvre, Paris (RF 1652) (J 78)

Working from life drawings (the models for the damned main- and expressive autonomy of a real model. The Greek youth is
tained their poses with the help of ropes), he transferred the not only a study of the expression of an emotion but also an
figures to the canvas and then, recognizing an imbalance in the actual embodiment of a story, a destiny.
composition, changed their positions.⁸⁴ In a sense, the choice
of works he exhibited at the Salon of 1824 was emblematic of
that method. Alongside the Massacres at Chios, Delacroix dis- Flesh and the Nude
played two studies that were listed under the same number in
the Salon catalogue, but without descriptions. In all likelihood, By beginning with a man or woman who posed for him rather
these were Head of an Old Greek Woman (cat. 7) and Orphan than a model from antiquity, Delacroix adopted a fundamen-
Girl in the Cemetery (fig. 9), both preliminary oil studies for the tally new relationship to the model, one in which the ideal had
large painting. Orphan Girl (not its original title) portrays a to yield to the expression of a form of realism. The artist was
beggar girl to whom Delacroix alluded in his Journal on now in search not of perfection but of life, as he plainly stated:
February 17, 1824, when he indicated that she was the model for
the figure of the young Greek boy at the far left of the composi- Never seek an empty perfection. Some faults, some
tion. That figure seems to have been the element upon which things which the vulgar call faults, often give vitality to
the entire painting was elaborated. At the same time, it manages a work. My picture is beginning to develop a rhythm, a
to support the painting all on its own, displaying the dramatic powerful spiral momentum. I must make the most of it.

“FAME IS NOT AN EMPTY WORD”: 1822–32 25

 CAT. 2 Female Academy Figure: Seated, Front View (Mademoiselle Rose), ca. 1820–23

I must keep that good black color, that happy, rather Figure: Seated, Front View (Mademoiselle Rose) (cat. 2), which
dirty quality, and those limbs which I know how to portrays a model who was probably nicknamed Rose, the artist
paint and few others even attempt. The mulatto will do was less intent on scrupulously representing anatomy (the
very well. I must get fullness. Even though it loses its foreshortening of the right arm is slightly exaggerated) than
naturalness, it will gain in richness and beauty.⁸⁵ on rendering the iridescence of feminine flesh tones, which
range from pink to green and then from green to brown. Here
In his studies, the artist attended less to the form and Delacroix captured in a new way the secret of life palpitating
structure of objects and bodies than to their surface and color. beneath the skin and, more particularly, the role of reflections,
The young Delacroix achieved mastery of the color of human which he had learned from Rubens. Especially on the thighs,
bodies through observation and his original conception of the the skin’s material substance is conveyed with hatchings of
most academic of exercises: the nude. In the Female Academy various colors applied with a brush. On an empirical level, this

26 DELACROIX
 CAT. 10 Portrait of Aspasie, ca. 1824

technique anticipates optical mixture, which Delacroix would the painting is midway between a study and a portrait. The size
practice more systematically beginning in the early 1830s. The of the canvas and the pose of the sitter—a woman seated in a
effect was enhanced by the choice of a dark ground, which chair, her gestures subtle, her gaze directed toward the
projects the body forward and accentuates its luminosity. viewer—are consistent with the canons of portraiture. By
An added layer of virtuosity is found in Portrait of Aspasie, contrast, the bare throat and breast were possible within the
painted about 1824, now in the Musée Fabre, Montpellier context of this genre only because Delacroix used a studio
(cat. 10). Delacroix kept the portrait in his studio until late in model, one who was, moreover, a woman of mixed race. The
his career and seems to have accorded it a certain importance: composition therefore plays on an ambiguity: on the one hand,
the model’s first name appears on a list of works the artist the model is idealized, ennobled by the pose; on the other,
entered in his Journal on October 4, 1857.⁸⁶ Preceded by two her state of undress underscores her inferior status, her subor-
small, highly refined canvases (fig. 10 and private collection), dination to the painter’s artistic and perhaps sexual desire.⁸⁷

“FAME IS NOT AN EMPTY WORD”: 1822–32 27

FIG. 10Aspasie (Red Background), ca. 1824. Oil on canvas, 105⁄8 x 87⁄16 in. Model Wearing a Turban, ca. 1824–26. Pastel on buff paper, 18½ x 1415⁄16 in.
FIG. 11
(27 x 21.5 cm). Private collection (J 80) (47 x 38 cm). Musée du Louvre, Paris (RF 32268) (Johnson 1995, no. 14)

There has been speculation about whether the woman in extending the investigation of nonwhite figures previously
the two small studies was the Aspasie depicted in the painting undertaken by his friend Gericault; another example is a
in Montpellier. But there is no question that the same woman pastel study of a dark-skinned man in a turban (fig. 11).
modeled for all three works. In the study of Aspasie against a In his depictions of Aspasie, Delacroix explored a relatively
red background (fig. 10) the model also shows a bare breast, wide range of pictorial possibilities. The matter at hand was
with the nipple visible, as in the larger painting; and the other evidently to capture the ways in which dark skin reflects light
study (private collection) shows a similar expression in the and to render its texture. He therefore underscored with a
eyes and the hint of a smile. In addition, there is a preliminary darker brown parts of the anatomy, such as the armpits and the
drawing for the painting in which the face is identical to the back of the hand—here given a velvety quality—that are mostly
one in Aspasie (Red Background). The canvas from the Musée ignored in strictly academic nudes. He also played on the
Fabre is thus the idealized version of a model elaborated on contrast between the brown complexion and the intense red
the basis of these two studies. of the lips. A comparison of the three Aspasies shows that he
The work’s originality lies in its treatment of the woman’s was studying how the face and body interact with a colored
skin color. In the parlance of the time, she was considered ground, which goes from red to green in the painting in
neither altogether black nor white and regarded as sang mêlé, Montpellier. The three versions thus constitute a true study
that is, of mixed blood.⁸⁸ Delacroix may thus be seen as of color conducted at the same time as Massacres at Chios.

28 DELACROIX
 This manner of treating the nude in terms of its color One may well wonder to what extent young artists of
rather than its structure struck some visitors to the Salon when Delacroix’s generation were driven by the unconscious need
they saw Massacres at Chios. The reviewer for Le globe noted: to approach, by means of a necessary displacement in time
“[Delacroix] has almost, and for no reason, made some and space, the unthinkable in the national past—namely,
bodies green, others yellow, others reddish-brown; he has massacres. Such a question need not impugn the sincerity of
brought together the most different colorings.”⁸⁹ The critic that generation’s engagement with contemporary phenomena
thus pointed out the novelty, in that day, of the rendering such as the philhellenic movement. But it was a burning
of diverse flesh tones. Delacroix’s unfortunate Greeks, men question for Delacroix, who was among the direct descen-
and women of flesh and blood, some pale, others tanned, dants of the generation that had actively participated in the
present a striking contrast to the Neoclassical heroes painted events of the Revolution, including the tragic hours of the
by David’s imitators, with their uniforms and marmoreal Reign of Terror. He always proclaimed pride in his father, a
whiteness directly influenced by Greco-Roman statuary. The deputy and diplomatic emissary at the Convention, whose
painting served as a pictorial manifesto, and it also carried a aura was preserved by his early death. It is significant that the
reflection on history, if not on politics. Delacroix, a “child of anecdote Delacroix recalled most fondly concerned his
the century” who witnessed the fall of the Empire at an early father’s resistance to agitators backed by the most extremist
age, meditated throughout his life on the greatness, decline, elements of the Revolution. He thereby found reassurance
and perpetuation of civilizations. For him, was not the idea of in his father’s supposed moderation. Two other massacres
“mixed blood” a condition for the survival of civilizations? were on view at the Salon of 1824: Léon Cogniet’s Scene from
The diverse skin colors of the Greeks he painted in Massacres the Massacre of the Innocents (Musée des Beaux-Arts, Rennes)
at Chios have nothing in common with the abstract ideal of and Charles-Emile Callande de Champmartin’s Massacre of
Hellenic purity so vaunted by the Neoclassical writers the Innocents (Louvre). These were followed in 1827 by Ary
and painters. Scheffer’s Souliot Women (Louvre). Other scenes of mass
execution appearing at the Salons of the period are worth
noting: Horace Vernet’s Massacre of the Mamelukes in Cairo in
“Greek Families Awaiting Death or Slavery” 1811 in 1819; and Champmartin’s Massacre of the Janissaries in

With his subject taken from contemporary history, Delacroix

painted not heroes of antiquity but the men, women, and
children of his own time, as the text in the Salon catalogue
indicates: “See the various accounts and newspapers of the
time.” This was not the ideal Greece of Pericles or Leonidas
but the very real Greece, gateway to the Orient, of a people
fighting for their freedom. That historical and (in the strict
sense) embodied vision must have been transgressive at the
time. We have trouble perceiving that quality in the painting
today, but it accounts for audiences’ general blindness to his
subject, which most interpreted as a plague or derided as
“filth.” The philhellenism of Delacroix and some of his con-
temporaries combined political and artistic demands. Auguste
Jal, in his review of the Salon of 1824, became their spokes-
man: “I have had enough of the old Greeks; it’s the modern
Greeks who interest me. . . . Farewell, ancient Greece,
which saw so much bloodshed. . . . Hail to you, Hellenia, Charles-Emile Callande de Champmartin (French, 1797–1883),
FIG. 12
young and proud, who are stepping out of your cradle in Massacre of the Janissaries, 1826. Oil on canvas, 185⁄8 x 24¾ in. (47.2 x
ruins, to the cries of fatherland and freedom!”⁹⁰ 62.8 cm). Musée d’Art et d’Histoire, Rochefort (inv. 2007.8.15)

“FAME IS NOT AN EMPTY WORD”: 1822–32 29

1827 (fig. 12). Although Vernet’s and Champmartin’s paintings the door to paintings of fratricidal battles and the mass extermi-
do not portray innocent civilian populations and therefore did nation of ethnic groups, with all the disorder, injustice, terror,
not have the cathartic quality of Delacroix’s painting, they did and ambiguity they suggested. These scenes, with their depic-
swell the ranks of slaughter that assaulted the eyes of visitors to tions of civilian populations, including women and children,
the Salon. These spectacular stagings of massacres in paint exerted a much stronger appeal to emotion. Delacroix’s mon-
possibly satisfied a need for expression and a need to appeal umental work, or grande machine, as it was called, brought
to the collective memory of the French. The Revolution had viewers face to face with the tragedy of the Greeks, who
revived in modern France the ancient practice of massacres formed a kind of fixed wall before them. It also forced behold-
that had bloodied the country during the religious and politi- ers to acknowledge their own responsibility, insofar as the
cal conflicts of the sixteenth century. But in the 1820s, paint- victims seem to have no hope of rescue. Prostrate, they await
ers took their subjects from the Bible or from current events death or slavery, as the Salon catalogue explains. The sparsity
in foreign countries, thus maintaining a certain distance of movement and the action, frozen or relegated to the mar-
through art and exoticism. gins, compel spectators to focus on the bodies and the suffer-
The Empire had permitted the representation of war ing souls, tormented by shame and despair. It is a vision of
only in its disciplined and reputedly civilized forms—con- horror to lead the audience itself to revolt.
frontations between professional armies, preparations for The contrast between the pathos of the scene and the
those encounters (the readying and deployment of forces), luminosity of the landscape, between the coarseness of the
and their aftermaths (battlefield visits, care of the wounded, brushwork in the lower part of the canvas and the delicate
acts of clemency toward prisoners, the signing of peace trea- treatment of the sky, conveys a kind of dereliction that is
ties)—within the highly controlled context of propaganda. expressed in the eyes of the old woman, inspired by Orphan
The liberalization of the art scene in the first years of the Girl in the Cemetery (see fig. 9). Delacroix disconcerted the
Restoration allowed for freer artistic expression, opening Salon audience not only by accumulating a large number of

FIG. 13 A Battlefield, Evening, 1824. Oil on canvas, 187⁄8 x 22¼ in. (48 x 56.6 cm). The FIG. 14Théodore Gericault (French, 1791–1824). Wounded
Mesdag Collection, The Hague (inv. hwm 0112) (J 104) Cuirassier, 1814. Oil on canvas, 11 ft. 1815⁄16 in. x 9 ft. 7¾ in.
(3.6 x 3 m). Musée du Louvre, Paris (4886)

30 DELACROIX
 FIG. 15 Turkish Officer Killed in the Mountains, or The Death of Hassan, 1826. Oil on canvas, 13 x 161⁄8 in. (33 x 41 cm).
Private collection (J 113)

wretched human figures and emptying out the central zone, perhaps, an apt expression of dismay in the face of such pow-
normally the place of the hero. He caused astonishment also erlessness. The absence of a divine miracle or any other tran-
by extending the background to a far- distant horizon, thus scendence makes more urgent the call to others—namely,
tapping into a different pictorial subgenre: the topographical viewers at the Salon—for help. The painting plays on the
battle painting, of the type exemplified by Louis François cathartic effect of a contemporary tragedy.
Lejeune during the Empire. The artful spatial arrangement War as seen by Delacroix is at odds with the heroic
provided Delacroix a high vantage point overlooking one end vision still present in Gericault; in Massacres at Chios, war has
of the island. The landscape unfolds across fields and farms no panache. Delacroix’s A Battlefield, Evening (fig. 13), realized
punctuated by palm trees before ending at a city on a bay, during the same period, was inspired by Gericault’s Wounded
with a port at its edge. Fires on land and at sea attest to the Cuirassier (fig. 14), exhibited at the Salon of 1814. But where
ubiquity of fighting and destruction. Sea and sky, undisturbed Gericault transfigured the despair of defeat and the soldier’s
by vertical intrusions (trees, rocks, masts), occupy a third of isolation into heroism, Delacroix presented the spectacle of
the painted surface. The sky is astonishingly empty and flat, disillusionment: all is desolation. In Gericault’s painting, the
traversed only by long trails of cloud: it is two- dimensional, cuirassier is the unfortunate double of the groom attempting
motionless, and uninvolved with the action on the ground. to restrain one of the two Horses of Marly (1745; Musée du
The merciless indifference of nature signals the immanence of Louvre), but he is still in control of his mount.⁹¹ In A Battlefield,
human despair. The artist took the opposite course from that Evening, by contrast, the soldier crawls, pitiable and alone,
of his model, Gros’s Napoleon Visiting the Plague Victims of Jaffa, amid the cadavers of horses, in mud and blood. Blood is also
in which Bonaparte seems to rise up like a magician from the found in the foreground of Massacres at Chios, especially on
tragedy under way. The allusion by some critics to a plague, the Christlike figure in the center of the composition. Two
though it obviously brings to mind Gros’s masterpiece, is also, years later, for an exhibition at Galerie Lebrun held as a

“FAME IS NOT AN EMPTY WORD”: 1822–32 31

benefit for the Greeks, Delacroix displayed Turkish Officer Delacroix added vibrant touches of red, black, and yellow to
Killed in the Mountains, or The Death of Hassan (fig. 15). The his Massacres at Chios, which he probably considered too
corpse, dressed in a magnificent uniform, lies abandoned monochrome and lacking in homogeneity. He thereby gave it
while a village burns in the background, as in Massacres at more brilliance.
Chios. The unusual nature of this representation, centered on Delacroix, in his ardor to take up brushes and paint,
a corpse, was pointed out in Ludovic Vitet’s contemporaneous neglected the tedious academic work of preparing the compo-
critique, which classified the painting as a study.⁹² sition. Such preparation typically required, after the overall
For a second time, Delacroix had gambled and won. composition had been defined in a sketch, a careful, separate
His stature was reinforced by the royal museums’ acquisition study (drawn, or sometimes painted) for each of the important
of Massacres at Chios, but the critics were harsh, and for the elements (heads, limbs, principal accessories), which were
most part they did not understand the painting. The painter then transposed by means of a grid and assembled on the can-
François Joseph Navez, a student of David’s in Brussels, vas, to be executed in oil. Once his painting was completed,
summed up the situation in a letter to his fellow artist Louis Delacroix became aware of the dangers of his own virtuosity,
Léopold Robert: “The Massacre at Chios is only an intention, the risks inherent in his way of composing on the basis of
it is neither drawn nor painted, but it is impossible to give a “beautiful pieces” painted directly on the canvas. In reeval-
more accurate idea of misfortune. . . . All of that is character- uating the execution phase of his creative process, he wrote,
ized so well that it penetrates; there is originality in the color. “I must make many sketches and take my time. That above
He will go far if he studies, but he will lose his way if he all is where I need to make progress. . . . The main thing is
continues on this path.”⁹³ When Navez indicated that the to avoid that infernal facility of the brush. Instead, make the
painting was only an intention, he was likely referring to medium difficult to work with, like marble—that would be
the absence of unity, which was caused partly by the young completely new. Make the medium resistant, so as to conquer
artist’s method of composing his paintings on the basis of the it patiently” (see fig. 104).⁹⁸
model. It appears that Delacroix was highly sensitive to that
frequently made criticism of his work. Had he himself not
recognized this flaw? His Journal entries on the genesis of Lessons from England: The Merging of Genres
Massacres at Chios document his distress over the fragmenta-
tion of the scene and the difficulty he had in putting together The conquering strategy that Delacroix had employed suc-
the various pieces, painted brilliantly but in isolation. He cessfully since 1822 would attain its highest achievement at the
began to execute the figures in early 1824, and toward the end Salon of 1827–28. His career up until that moment was summa-
of March he worried about the “disjointedness” of the work rized by Charles Paul Landon as follows:
under way. On May 9, 1824, he noted: “My painting is begin-
ning to take on a different appearance; disjointedness is M. Delacroix made his debut in the fine arts at the
giving place to sombreness. . . . I am changing the plan.”⁹⁴ moment most favorable to him. Twenty years earlier,
Following his own advice, he resumed reading Dante. his works would have caused only unwelcome aston-
A few weeks later, while visiting the Paris art dealer ishment; they might have been spurned by the pub-
John Arrowsmith, Delacroix saw five canvases by the English lic. . . . Perhaps the jury would not even have accepted
painter John Constable, including his famous Hay Wain them for the Salon. Today, by contrast, M. Delacroix
(1821; National Gallery, London).⁹⁵ According to Théophile has champions and proselytes, admirers, copiers. The
Silvestre, Delacroix was so struck by these paintings that he judges awarded him a medal of encouragement at the
retouched his own composition.⁹⁶ Frédéric Villot wrote in Salon of 1824. He has gained a following; he is praised,
1856 that, at the time, “he made the light denser, introduced supported. He is entrusted with major projects.⁹⁹
rich gray tones, gave transparency to the shadows through the
use of glazes, made the blood circulate and the flesh quiver.”⁹⁷ Delacroix, now recognized, was determined to show the
Whatever the exact influence of the British painter and the range of his talent. He presented the jury with seventeen
precise time when this retouching took place, a virtuoso paintings. Four were rejected, including his portrait of a

34 DELACROIX
 friend, Louis-Auguste Schwiter (see cat. 30), and Combat of the
Giaour and Hassan (cat. 27), inspired by Lord Byron, which he
treated in a contemporary lithograph (fig. 16) and whose
subject he returned to in a painting nine years later (cat. 87).
The following were accepted: a portrait, Count Demetrius de
Palatiano (1794–1849) in Suliot Costume (see cat. 25); two
public commissions, Christ in the Garden of Olives (The Agony
in the Garden) (see cat. 17), awarded by the prefecture of the
Seine for the church of Saint-Paul-Saint-Louis, and Emperor
Justinian, for the halls of the Conseil d’Etat at the Louvre
(destroyed in 1871; see cat. 28); a contemporary subject, Scene
from the War between the Turks and the Greeks; literary subjects,
The Execution of Doge Marino Faliero (exhibited the previous
year at Galerie Lebrun) (fig. 25), Faust in His Study, and Milton
Dictating “Paradise Lost” to His Daughters; Oriental subjects,
Head Study of an Indian Woman¹⁰⁰ and Young Turk Stroking His
Horse;¹⁰¹ an animal subject, Two English Farm Horses;¹⁰² and
genre subjects, Mortally Wounded Brigand Quenches His Thirst
(cat. 22), painted for Alexandre Du Sommerard, and Still Life
CAT. 28 Justinian Drafting His Laws, sketch, 1826 with Lobsters (fig. 17).

CAT. 22 Mortally Wounded Brigand Quenches His Thirst, ca. 1825

36 DELACROIX
FIG. 17 Still Life with Lobsters, 1826–27. Oil on canvas, 31½ x 41¾ in. (80 x 106 cm). Musée du Louvre, Paris (RF 1661) (J 161)

With the rejected portrait of Schwiter, the accepted César Cyr du Coëtlosquet, is somewhere between a still life
portrait of the count de Palatiano, and Still Life with Lobsters, and a landscape painting, with a hunting scene added in the
the artist’s repertoire had broadened. He was making incur- background. An homage to both the seventeenth- century
sions into the minor genres, a process that would continue Flemish and Dutch masters and the most modern landscape
at the Salon of 1831 with Young Tiger Playing with Its Mother artists, with sky effects visibly inspired by Constable, the
(Study of Two Tigers) (see cat. 67). Delacroix had come under painting flaunts its incongruity. Fresh game from a hunt lies
the influence of British art after seeing the paintings of on the ground next to cooked lobsters, traditionally shown on
Constable and Sir Thomas Lawrence exhibited at the Salon of kitchen tables, and a salamander scuttles out of the still life.
1824 and in England, which he visited in 1825 on the advice Delacroix, wishing primarily to display his virtuosity in ren-
of his friend Thales Fielding (cat. 13). Assimilating that influ- dering matter with color, was playing with clichés: perhaps he
ence in an original way, he began painting works in which was alluding to the four elements. He treated these tropes
different genres were combined. Still Life with Lobsters (fig. 17), with a certain ironic offhandedness, as he himself remarked to
commissioned for the dining room of General Charles Yves his friend Soulier: “I completed the general’s animal painting

“FAME IS NOT AN EMPTY WORD”: 1822–32 37

 CAT. 13 Thales Fielding (1793–1837), ca. 1824–25 CAT. 29 Baron Schwiter (Louis Auguste Schwiter,
1805–1889), 1826

and dug up a rococo frame for it, which I am having regilded. the ostensibly relaxed poses of Thomas Lawrence’s sitters,
It will do the trick. It has already made quite a splash with a Delacroix preferred a formality that dates back to the origins of
load of art lovers, and I think it will be amusing at the Salon.”¹⁰³ the aristocratic portrait. The model’s strict frontality is affected;
With the portrait of his friend Louis Auguste Schwiter, his attitude is slightly ill at ease, a combination of naturalness
son of a marshal of the Empire who became a baron in 1808, and artifice. In an effort to represent not so much his friend’s
Delacroix attempted to combine a portrait with landscape psychology as the idea of refined elegance, the artist played on
painting (cats. 29, 30). The canvas, probably begun in 1826, a the expressive distortions of a very slender body with overly
few weeks after he returned from London, conveys the per- long arms. The impact of the clothing and pose competes with
sonal, French manner in which Delacroix reinterpreted British and even masks Schwiter’s personality and sexual proclivities.
portraiture. Schwiter exhibited the Anglomania of a dandy and The model’s attire is studiously stylish: in his black suit
lived in luxury in Paris. The choice of an “English-style” repre- with its pinched waist, his long trousers (an invention of the
sentation of Schwiter standing in a garden setting therefore famous Beau Brummel), his leather gloves and patent leather
seemed a fitting way to express his character. Leaving aside pumps, he seems dressed for a ball rather than a walk in the

38 DELACROIX
 CAT. 25 Count Demetrius de Palatiano (1794–1849)
in Suliot Costume, ca. 1825–26

park. Delacroix pushed the conventions of the English-style or whether the figure is inserted bizarrely into his environ-
portrait to their limits in this work—especially the relation- ment. We know that Demetrius de Palatiano, an aristocrat
ship between figure and ground—to express the artificiality from Corfu, enjoyed parading in the center of Paris wearing
of the dandy’s attitude. The same is true for the portrait of the sumptuous attire of his homeland, deliberately flouting
Demetrius de Palatiano (cat. 25), in which the exoticism of the Western fashions. In the context of the philhellenic move-
outfit is reinforced by the surroundings of an English land- ment of the time, which was stimulated by the writings of
scape garden, with its minuscule promenading figures, and by Byron and embraced by Delacroix, the extravagant count was
the count’s conventional pose, proudly struck, one foot in met with astonishment and admiration—and he made the
front of the other. The question is whether the surroundings most of it. Schwiter, with his extreme elegance, did the same.
are at odds with the figure, serving merely as a theatrical set, The vaunting of fancy dress at the expense of “natural”

40 DELACROIX
 CAT. 4 Self-Portrait as Ravenswood, ca. 1821–24

expressiveness derives partly from masquerade, the vogue for whose response to his early reversal of fortune may be read in
disguises, which is present also in Delacroix’s Self-Portrait as the nobility of his pose. Edgar Ravenswood is the protagonist
Ravenswood (cat. 4), and in his appearances at masked balls, of The Bride of Lammermoor, a novel by Sir Walter Scott, pub-
which, according to Alexandre Dumas, he attended dressed as lished in 1819 and very much in vogue at the time. The young
Dante. With the exception of Palatiano, who intentionally nobleman loses fortune and property when his father dies, as
played up his natural “strangeness,” these masquerades Delacroix did in the early 1820s with the catastrophic settle-
involved borrowed identities, designed to highlight one ment of his mother’s estate.¹⁰⁴ Delacroix had read The Bride of
aspect of the model’s personality, but not more. Lammermoor and identified with the story. Might not the por-
Self-Portrait as Ravenswood is both a portrait of a literary trait of Schwiter, dignified and majestic in its way, and with its
hero and an allusion to the financial difficulties of the artist, imposing format, express a certain convivial irony toward the

“FAME IS NOT AN EMPTY WORD”: 1822–32 41

 CAT. 67 Young Tiger Playing with Its Mother (Study of Two Tigers), 1830

artist’s friend, a Frenchman who posed in English-style finery? understanding the status of the work within the traditional
Revealing the subject’s dandyism as an assumed identity, the hierarchy of genres. Although presented to the Salon jury
work discloses the artificiality of the young man’s pretentions. under the title “Young Tiger Playing with Its Mother,” which
The dignity found in the Schwiter portrait was also was probably proposed by the artist, it appears in the cata-
present in a painting shown at the Salon of 1831, the imposing logue as “Study of Two Tigers.” The second formulation is
Young Tiger Playing with Its Mother (cat. 67). As indicated by clearly inadequate. The confusion stemmed from the fact that
Delacroix’s many renderings in graphic media of domestic in heroizing the animal, Delacroix dispensed with narrative
cats, tigers, and lions (cats. 60, 62, 63, 65, 66), the artist had a and dramatic action: there is no hunt, no tiger attacking a wild
particular predilection for felines. This enormous work is one horse (cats. 57, 58), no horse frightened by a storm, as in
of a kind in his oeuvre partly because of its monumental the watercolor at the Szépművészeti Múzeum in Budapest
format, which is close to that of a history painting, and partly (fig. 18; see also cat. 59). The subject is made heroic by a
because of the calmness of the image. Contemporaries were composition that, rather than seeking to capture the savage
disturbed by the unexpected scale of this animal painting. energy of nature, proffers analogies between the animal king-
A change in its title points to the difficulty they had in dom and humanity. Young Tiger Playing with Its Mother is, in

42 DELACROIX
fact, a portrait. The nobility of the mother tiger’s pose is akin
to Schwiter’s rather remote haughtiness (see cat. 30); the
dandy resembles the feline. Some critics would, in fact, find
fault with Delacroix for rendering the animals’ expressions
more accurately than those of men: “That unusual artist has
never painted a man who looks like a man in the way his tiger
looks like a tiger,” wrote the editor of the Journal des artistes.¹⁰⁵
There is a similar anthropomorphism in the Louvre’s Head of a
Cat (fig. 19). The profile pose, recalling the portraits of great
men found on ancient coins and medallions (see cat. 21), is
here adapted to a feline. In these works, Delacroix seems to
reverse theories of physiognomy: rather than likening man
to an animal, he highlights an animal’s resemblance to man.
The large painting owes its originality to the artist’s close
observation of animals and a notion of the animal kingdom
marked by the quarrel between the naturalists Georges Cuvier
and Geoffroy Sainte-Hilaire. Just as the Louvre was a place
where the young Delacroix could freely study the old masters
and thereby emancipate himself from academic precepts, the
Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle, located in the Jardin des
Plantes in Paris, offered him the opportunity to examine
and draw live animals, particularly wild creatures difficult to
see elsewhere (see cat. 60). On his regular visits there, he CAT. 48 Faust, plate 9: Mephistopheles Introduces
was also able to study the skinned corpses of animals, includ- Himself at Martha’s House, 1827
ing that of Admiral Rigny’s famous lion. In 1829, Delacroix
and the sculptor Antoine Louis Barye studied that specimen
by lamplight in an effort to understand the function of every We may wonder whether a self-portrait of the painter might
muscle. The painter’s work on skinned animals and feline have slipped into the improbable cat’s head. (Only a few
remains can be discerned in works from 1829 and 1830. Young years later, Charles Baudelaire would compare Delacroix to a
Tiger Playing with Its Mother was preceded by several water- tiger.) The similarities between man and animal in the painter’s
colors and ink wash drawings of tigers at rest (for example, understanding of the species are easily identifiable in the
cat. 61), their heads lowered to the ground between their marginalia of some of the Faust engravings. In Mephistopheles
front paws. That position, found also in the lithograph Royal Introduces Himself at Martha’s House (cat. 48), the attitude of
Tiger (cat. 65), is reminiscent of a skinned tiger drawn in one Mephistopheles, his back rounded, echoes that of the seated
of the artist’s notebooks now in the Louvre. In the painting, lion in the lower left corner of the sheet. From an expressive
Delacroix righted his model’s upper body in such a way that it standpoint, it appears that the association between the tempter
holds its head erect—with anthropomorphic nobility. and the lion signals a natural savagery behind Mephistopheles’s
According to the nineteenth- century critic and historian obsequious attitude. The presence of felines all around the
Hippolyte Taine, Delacroix was especially struck by the fact that image, either watchful or at rest, was a technical experiment,
the “lion’s front leg was the huge arm of a man, but twisted and but it introduced a disturbing atmosphere very much in
turned backward,” and that “there were in all human forms more keeping with the subject. A similar expressive association can
or less vague animal forms that had to be teased out.” The artist be found in a superb preliminary sheet for The Death of
is said to have gone even further, claiming that, on the basis of Sardanapalus: a dog’s terrifying maw in the midst of nude women
these forms, “you manage to discover in [man] the more or less awaiting death embodies the sadistic pleasure the Assyrian king
vague instincts that link his nature to one animal or another.”¹⁰⁶ feels as he contemplates the atrocity he has ordered.¹⁰⁷

“FAME IS NOT AN EMPTY WORD”: 1822–32 47

FIG. 20 The Death of Sardanapalus, 1826–27. Oil on canvas, 12 ft. 11½ in. x 16 ft. 27⁄8 in. (3.9 x 4.9 m). Musée du Louvre, Paris (RF 2346) (J 125)

He Painted with a “Drunken Broom” enormous columns, oversize bed, all thrown down pell-mell,
without stylistic effects or perspective, and hanging in mid-
The Death of Sardanapalus (fig. 20) was meant to be Delacroix’s air!”¹⁰⁸ It was such a disaster that Delacroix called the work
major exhibit at the Salon of 1827, but the painting was not “Massacre No. 2” and the museum administration refused to
ready in time for the opening on November 4. When it finally purchase it. Inspired by Byron’s drama of the same name,
arrived in January 1828, it provoked anger and indignation. Delacroix, perhaps channeling Diodorus Siculus, Byron’s
Charles Paul Landon fumed: “Are we to give the title of com- ancient Roman source, accentuated the dark side. The canvas
position to this incomprehensible hodgepodge of men, was almost unanimously reviled and caused an unprecedented
women, dogs, horses, logs, vases, instruments of every kind, scandal. A deadly orgy depicting the suicide of a king avid for

48 DELACROIX
 Sheet of studies for The Death of Sardanapalus, 1827. Chalk and pastel on paper, 173⁄16 x 2213⁄16 in. (43.7 x 58 cm). Musée du Louvre, Paris (RF 29665)
FIG. 21
(Johnson 1995, no. 1)

sex and luxury had inspired a wildly bold brush, which a few viewer. All the figures, as Jean-Pierre Thénot noted in a manual
years later Théophile Gautier would call a “drunken broom.” on perspective, “are drawn from the same place and at the same
The artist flouted the principles of art, decency, and modesty. height, without concern for the horizon in the painting or in
On a giant canvas, the color explodes in a welter of reds and nature.”¹⁰⁹ The space overflows with bodies, animals, objects,
golds both sensual and apparently disordered. Here, Delacroix, and jewelry. The unity of the composition is compromised by
in his quest for a modern mode of expressiveness, followed the that accumulation and further undermined by the apparently
path of chromatic overexuberance rather than the exaggeration arbitrary framing. As Ludovic Vitet remarked: “On every side,
of Michelangelesque form, as he had in his Barque of Dante. the meaning is interrupted by the border.”¹¹⁰ The viewer’s gaze,
This homage to Rubens was accompanied by contempt for the disturbed by the distortions in perspective, runs up against the
elementary rules of drawing and composition: the bodies are frame, which imprisons the eye inside the composition.
entangled, distorted, and stretched; a tremendous horse rears Although the work was preceded by many preliminary
up; and the king’s bed, on a diagonal seemingly reminiscent of studies (fig. 21) and an imposing sketch (cat. 31), Delacroix
The Raft of the Medusa, appears to be tipping over onto the again let himself be carried away by the extraordinary

50 DELACROIX
impetuousness and virtuosity of his brush and by his attention double. Delacroix was the organizer of the sadistic conflagra-
to detail and the model, developing the composition during tion, the compulsive collector of his own most beautifully
the execution phase as he added in the figures. In February painted elements, which he liked to pile up and spread out in
1849, on a visit to Charles Rivet, a childhood friend to whom precarious equilibrium, at the risk of seeing them collapse and
Delacroix would give the sketch for Sardanapalus, the artist overflow their boundaries. Delacroix filled the composition
explained how the idea for the work had come to him. (By with everything he knew how to paint, everything he had
then, Delacroix had sold the Salon picture, which prompted ardently elaborated in virtuoso studies during his early years:
him to paint a replica for himself; see cat. 104). According to clothing, jewelry, fabrics, babouches, weapons and gold, male
Rivet, the artist had been struck by the ferocious denouement and female nudes, horses, multiple shades of skin (see cats. 9,
of Bryon’s tragedy: the despot, ruler of Nineveh, immolates 11, 12, 14–16, 34; fig. 22). The welter accounts for the impres-
himself along with everything he has loved in order not to be sion of confusion decried by Delécluze, who failed to under-
taken by his enemies. “The scene as he first imagined it was stand that this apparent flaw was meant to render the chaos of
filled with grief and horror.” Rivet’s account conveys the imminent destruction: “The spectator was unable to penetrate
almost hallucinatory quality of literary inspiration, which gives a subject whose every element is isolated, where the eye
birth to a world seemingly composed of phantoms. Indeed, cannot disentangle the confusion of lines and colors.”¹¹³
Delacroix had declared in 1824, “What is real for me are the Although he focused his attention on the details,
illusions I create through painting.”¹¹¹ Delacroix gave some of the figures a new inflection. While
After the moment of inspiration, Delacroix made a wild, the woman in the foreground brilliantly displays the artist’s
dark sketch. When he moved on to the execution, he set out fidelity to the model, and the man with raised arms at the far
to paint one of the half-nude slave girls from a live model. right along with his desperate companion recall Gros’s natu-
He was then swept up in the seductiveness of imitation and ralistic prototypes in Napoleon Visiting the Plague Victims of Jaffa
“made the opal and gold on the torso palpitate with brilliant and Embarkation of Marie-Thérèse, Duchess of Angoulême, at
reflections.” The magnificent pastels (including fig. 21) the Pauillac (1818; Musée des Beaux-Arts, Bordeaux), the faces of
artist realized in the presence of live models confirm Rivet’s Sardanapalus and the women in the background have simplified
concluding statement: “He lost the general tone of the paint- features.¹¹⁴ About 1827, Delacroix, inspired by Moghul manu-
ing in order to preserve what he had done with such verve and scripts, medieval engravings, Indian paintings, and ancient
felicity. Therefore, he gradually modified all the accessories, coins (see cats. 20, 21), sought to stylize his brushstroke. He
and the entire scene took on a completely different effect now insisted on profiles drawn with sharp edges: modeling
from what it was supposed to express at first.”¹¹² This text shows was replaced by linear contours, and the forms became more
the active role that the execution played in Delacroix’s appre- geometric. In that move toward primitivism, he was trying not
hension of the subject. The sensuality of the composition only to imprint an Oriental character on his composition but
resulted from his handling of material substance, a process also, through a more synthetic approach, to free himself from
that modified his initial understanding. His imagination was the tyranny of the model and restore a certain ideality.
sparked during the execution phase: execution is also creation.
In 1849, twenty-one years after exhibiting the work, Delacroix,
now better in control of his craft, criticized the seductiveness Delacroix and the Question of the Hero
of color, as if he had once again yielded to the facility of the
brush, a temptation he had denounced in 1824. “My palette is The image of the ruler of Nineveh, motionless in the midst
no longer what it was. It may be less brilliant, but it no longer of futile turmoil, would be compared to David’s Leonidas at
loses its way. It is an instrument that plays only what I want it Thermopylae (1812; Musée du Louvre).¹¹⁵ Sardanapalus seems to
to play.” Delacroix also observed in 1849 that in 1827 or 1828, be the negative counterpart of Leonidas. David’s masterpiece
the overall spirit of the composition had been altered by the was formidable at the time, one of his few large paintings then
execution of a single element—the body of one of the figures. on view. Another was The Intervention of the Sabine Women (1799;
In a sense, Sardanapalus, both greedy for and detached Musée du Louvre).¹¹⁶ Both were hanging in the Louvre in
from the surging wave of objects and bodies, is the artist’s March 1826, when Delacroix conceived the idea for The Death

“FAME IS NOT AN EMPTY WORD”: 1822–32 53

CAT. 20 Studies of Seven Greek Coins, 1825 CAT. 21 Studies of Twelve Greek and Roman Coins, 1825

of Sardanapalus. In formal terms, the Salon painting, in the way it men, women, and children whose bruised bodies display the
violated the rules by making the execution phase visible, struck a pathos of a vanquished resistance. Very often, Delacroix
blow against the Davidian ideal of composition. Furthermore, pushed the hero to the margins of the composition; decen-
even with his first works, Delacroix had challenged the heroism tered, he is under threat of losing his preeminent place. Such
traditionally associated with history painting in general and with is the case in The Battle of Nancy (cat. 69), commissioned by
the exemplum virtutis in particular. Delacroix’s Sardanapalus, the Ministère de l’Intérieur in 1828 for the city of Nancy,
deliberately darker than the figure in Byron’s tragedy, is stylized where the work was to be sent in anticipation of a visit by King
as an egotistical monster, a distant and inaccessible despot in Charles X. The subject, the death of Charles the Bold, was
a pose wavering between indolence and melancholy. Unlike assigned to the artist after consultation with the city’s Société
Leonidas, he is impervious to the unhappiness around him, Royale des Sciences, Lettres et Arts.¹¹⁷ Just as Massacres
which he himself has caused. He is an allegory of immoderation at Chios paid tribute to Gros’s Napoleon Visiting the Plague
and greed, dwarfed by the mad accumulation of living beings Victims of Jaffa, this composition is a reinterpretation of
assembled under his final order and for his own pleasure. He Gros’s Napoleon on the Battlefield of Eylau (fig. 23), which had
appears enigmatic and paradoxical, at once creator, beholder, impressed visitors to the Salon of 1808 with its display of
and destroyer of his own collections. frozen corpses in the foreground. The Battle of Nancy took
Delacroix, a child of the Revolution, witness to the glory place on January 5, 1477, and it inspired in Delacroix the
of empire and the fall of the hero, was a man of his genera- original idea for a field of ice and snow. In the magnificent
tion. As such, he could no longer accept unquestioningly the sketch (fig. 24), he even replicated the topography of the
heroism inherent in history painting. His painting therefore battlefield of Eylau, a feature that Dominique Vivant Denon,
challenged the hero’s unique, positive, unifying, and exem- the director general of museums, had required for the compe-
plary status. Massacres at Chios (fig. 5) even sanctioned the tition Gros won in 1808. Conceived as a vast landscape in
hero’s disappearance in favor of a collective of anonymous which the warm effects of a sky at dusk enter into dialogue

“FAME IS NOT AN EMPTY WORD”: 1822–32 57

 FIG. 25The Execution of Doge Marino Faliero, 1825–26. Oil on canvas, 575⁄16 x 4413⁄16 in.
(145.6 x 113.8 cm). The Wallace Collection, London (inv. P282) (J 112)

with the coldness of the frozen, uneven ground, the painting Council of Ten exhibits the blade—the instrument of justice—
is, effectively, in search of a hero: Charles the Bold is being to the people, who are gathered outside the spectator’s view.
pushed outside the frame, and therefore out of history, by the The composition is devoid of psychology and violent action.
long spear of an anonymous knight. Once again, Delacroix To borrow Auguste Jal’s formulation, the artist “presented the
reversed the conceit of his model, in which the emperor arrives cold denouement of a tragedy whose movements are hidden
as a hero to reestablish order through clemency. from us.”¹¹⁸ The center of the painting is an empty white
The Execution of Doge Marino Faliero (fig. 25) was inspired staircase, an expression of deposed power symbolized by the
by Byron’s tragic drama Marino Faliero, Doge of Venice and was lifeless body that has fallen to the level of the plebs ready to
displayed for the first time in the 1826 exhibition held as a invade the court of the Doge’s Palace. The staircase separates
benefit for the Greeks. In Delacroix’s painting, the doge’s two intensely colored spaces, warmer at the top, cooler at the
decapitated corpse lies at the foot of the stairs, his neck still bottom. The force of history lies not in the body of the hero
on the block, and his head, which has fallen to the ground, executed for high treason but in the accessories, the corno
hidden under a cloth. The executioner turns away from the ducale (ducal hat) and the enormous gold mantle, that have
corpse, while on the balcony above him, a member of the been carried to the top of the steps.

60 DELACROIX
 CAT. 64 The Murder of the Bishop of Liège, 1829

The high stakes of power and death are conveyed by the register is sullied by the doge’s execution below. The result
rhetoric of gesture, which is relegated to the middle ground, is an ambiguous composition in which, to borrow Ludovic
and also by the deployment of textiles—by color. The yellow Vitet’s expression, “jokers will surely say that the main charac-
underside of the blue carpet on which the doge’s corpse lies ter is the staircase.”¹¹⁹ The work undermines the classical rules
mirrors the gold of the ducal robe. The violence of the scene of history painting, which require a clearly expressed moral
is expressed by dabs of red scattered through the composition lesson. Here, a state ceremonial is deprived of a hero.
(the executioner’s cloak, the patricians’ clothing, the men’s The Murder of the Bishop of Liège (cat. 64) is as animated
caps), conjuring blood. As in Massacres at Chios and Greece on as Marino Faliero is static. In this work, inspired by Sir Walter
the Ruins of Missolonghi (see cat. 26), blood is depicted in the Scott’s historical novel Quentin Durward, published in 1823,
foreground, where it streams onto the block and soaks into Delacroix was less interested in the tragic hero than in the
the carpet. The splendor of the fabrics displayed in the upper violent encounter between the bishop, who is being stripped

“FAME IS NOT AN EMPTY WORD”: 1822–32 61

 CAT. 71 Interior of a Dominican Convent in Madrid (L’Amende Honorable), 1831

of his liturgical props, and the ferocious William de la Marck, The assassination scene takes place during a banquet:
“the wild boar of the Ardennes.” Architecture is a full-fledged the exaggerated perspective, accentuated by the brilliance of
actor in this and other of the artist’s works from the 1820s in the white tablecloth, structures the composition; like the
which dramas play out before spectators. Marino Faliero’s large marble staircase in Marino Faliero, the banquet table separates
staircase shows the influence of theater on Delacroix, and The the protagonists. The physiognomy and attitude of the execu-
Murder of the Bishop of Liège and Interior of a Dominican Convent tioner are similar to those in A Blacksmith (cat. 80), etched at
in Madrid (L’Amende Honorable) (cat. 71) attest to the impres- nearly the same time. Armed with a crude knife, he is shown
sions he formed during visits to historical monuments, includ- rolling up his sleeves to do his dirty work. The impression
ing the Gothic halls of the Palais de Justice in Rouen and of of a stifling atmosphere, rendered by the warm colors, chiar-
Westminster Abbey in London. oscuro, gleaming glasses, light of the torches, vast crowd,

62 DELACROIX
 What brigands they make! What jovial and bloodthirsty
brutality! How they swarm and yelp, how they blaze
and reek!”¹²¹
When the hero does not melt into the anonymity of a
collective, when he is not pushed to the margins of the com-
position, he is very often split in two to convey the comple-
mentary and dialectical facets of a divided humanity: animal
instincts and divine aspirations, good and evil, emotion and
reason. Introduced in 1822 with The Barque of Dante, the
theme of the double was developed in Delacroix’s prints,
particularly the series of lithographs inspired by Faust, which
the publisher Motte commissioned to accompany Albert
Stapfer’s 1823 French translation of Goethe’s tragedy (see
cats. 36–56). The print series was published in 1828, but
Delacroix seems to have taken an interest in the subject con-
siderably earlier. In 1824, he wrote in his Journal of his interest
in engravings after Faust that he had seen. They were probably
either the prints done by the German painter Peter Cornelius
beginning in 1811 and published in 1816, or those by Moritz
Retzsch, published the same year. His interest was aroused
again by the spectacular theatrical performance of George
Soane and Daniel Terry’s Devil and Dr. Faustus, loosely based
on Goethe’s play, that he attended in London in 1825. The
painter presented an original interpretation that would
captivate Goethe himself. Taking advantage of the narrative
possibilities created by the series format, he focused primarily
on the reciprocal evolution of the hero and his evil genius—
Marguerite having been destroyed by their relationship from
the start. In the earliest prints, such as Faust Trying to Seduce
Marguerite (see cat. 47), Delacroix represented the two men
as monstrously alike. Later on, he tended to give a more
human physiognomy to Faust and animalistic features to
Mephistopheles (see cat. 53), emphasizing the diabolical and
CAT. 80 A Blacksmith, 1833
almost schizophrenic character of the partnership prior to
its dissolution.
guests’ brutal, frenetic body language, and accumulation of Shortly before, with Macbeth Consulting the Witches (see
ruddy faces resembling grimacing masks would spark memo- cat. 19), Delacroix had proposed a more ambiguous represen-
ries of the massacres perpetrated during the Revolution and, tation of a hero split in two, threatened by the danger of
for those viewing the painting a few years later, the sack of the schizophrenia. This plate epitomizes Romantic lithography.
archbishop’s palace in Paris, which took place in February Delacroix reversed the normal practice for the medium:
1831. What is depicted is less an individual story than a violent instead of drawing with a lithographic pencil, he covered the
spectacle in which, as Alain Corbin argues, a mob creates a stone completely with violent black hatching; then, with a
bloody representation of itself.¹²⁰ Gautier described the paint- stylus, he drew the shapes and physiognomies, making them
ing well: “This little canvas screams, vociferates, blasphemes . . . emerge literally from the darkness. With the same tool, he
you hear the obscene songs of that drunken rabble of soldiers. released and modulated a flood of light. The virtuosity of the

“FAME IS NOT AN EMPTY WORD”: 1822–32 63

 CAT. 19 Macbeth Consulting the Witches, 1825

line obtained by scraping—sinewy for the witches, more written text of Macbeth at the time, did not choose the first
undulating for the diabolical vapors, very strong and insistent encounter between the witches and the hero on the brink of
for the fire, subtle for the drops overflowing the kettle— becoming an assassin. He opted for the much more ambigu-
produced an impression of instability that raises doubts about ous first scene of act 4. Macbeth is portrayed at the moment
the reality of the scene. Does Macbeth really see the witches, of his fall, when murder becomes an end in itself and no
or are they the figments of his guilty conscience, now fully in longer necessarily serves his political plans. The witches then
the grip of evil? The dazed expression in his eyes might sug- conjure up scenes of prophecy, as frightening as they are
gest they are mere imaginings. Delacroix, who knew only the incomprehensible.

“FAME IS NOT AN EMPTY WORD”: 1822–32 69

 CAT. 8 Tasso in the Hospital of St. Anna, Ferrara, 1824

The expression of the madness that threatens heroes also menacing shadow is cast. He, like the author of Gerusalemme
appears in the first version of Tasso in the Hospital of St. Anna, Liberata, appears in a halo of light; he is the inverted image of
Ferrara (cat. 8). The poet, depicted in the pose of a melan- the poet assailed by his inner demons. Rather than focusing
cholic, is confined in the madhouse of St. Anna in Ferrara, on the picturesque aspect of a subject so beloved of the
where he is taunted by other inmates. In this original render- Romantics, Delacroix expressed its violence: Tasso’s illumi-
ing of the confrontation between the poet and a madman, nated face stands out against a dark scene showing a guard
Delacroix gave the hero and his tormentor similar facial fea- violently whipping a wretched creature whose head barely
tures. The madman stands before a wall onto which his emerges from the obscurity of the background, a possible

70 DELACROIX
allusion to the torments of Tasso’s soul at the time. Whereas the city of Missolonghi against Ottoman troops that were
Tasso’s melancholy conveys the image of the accursed poet, partly composed of Egyptian divisions. The triumphant, dark-
alone and misunderstood, Sardanapalus’s reveals the sadistic skinned soldier who appears in the middle ground is probably
egotism of the despot. In the 1820s, it is clear that Delacroix an Egyptian. The Greek resisters, worn down by starvation
took care to deliberately undermine the triumphant heroism and disease, were ultimately forced to yield, but they blew
traditionally associated with history painting. themselves up rather than surrender. The survivors were
In its immoderation and profusion, The Death of massacred. For philhellenes, and for Delacroix in particular,
Sardanapalus was an experiment pushed to the extreme. the reference to Missolonghi held added significance. Byron
The artist abandoned himself fully to his own virtuosity and had succumbed to a fever in that city in 1824, on his way to
yielded willingly to the seductiveness of his materials. His bring funds and assistance to the insurgents. The younger
brush is jubilant; the color explodes. He pursued the most generation of France, eager for glory and battle, had been
diverse, even contradictory of paths while continuing to apply roused to the Greeks’ cause through Byron’s writings. The
what he had learned from his previous works. His unbridled canvas of 1826 can therefore be read as a memorial to the
imagination was fueled by the observation of live models recently deceased poet, who so often inspired Delacroix,
transformed into beautifully painted pictorial elements that especially in the artist’s many versions of the Combat of the
accumulate even at the risk of jeopardizing the composition’s Giaour and the Pasha (see fig. 16; cats. 27, 87).
balance. Delacroix was spurred on by the Oriental subject, But the allegory Greece on the Ruins of Missolonghi tran-
but the work’s monumental failure, the violent reactions of scends the specificity of current events and offers a reflection
visitors to the Salon, seems to have convinced him of the on the meaning of history. Horror and signs of violence
hazards of this type of painting, in which the material threat- appear in the middle ground, where severed heads are placed
ened to smother the idea. In a sense, Sardanapalus was by its on a wall, and in the foreground, where a hand emerges
very nature a dead end, and he now had to find a way out—to from the blood-streaked rubble. These virtuoso details,
employ greater rationality. At the following Salon, Delacroix’s chilling in their realism, are vivid reminders of the reality of
awareness of the situation and acumen about his art led him the massacre, as are the details in Massacres at Chios (see
to reverse course. In July 28, 1830: Liberty Leading the People fig. 5). Conversely, the Egyptian victor’s mien does not
(fig. 26), he presented a painting in which everything is horrify; it is as if Delacroix withholds judgment. Early com-
perfectly in its place, composed and balanced. mentators’ remarks about the agitated state of the allegorical
figure of Greece are unfounded; her gesture is not one of
denunciation, imprecation, and terror. She seems to accept as
Toward Real Allegory: Greece on the ineluctable the sacrifice imposed on her as she exhibits her
Ruins of Missolonghi wounds to the viewer. The painting marks the beginning of
the artist’s reflections on the greatness and decline of civiliza-
Delacroix had begun to explore that “more reasonable” path tions, a subject that would haunt his imagination throughout
in Greece on the Ruins of Missolonghi (cat. 26) a year prior to the his life.
scandal at the Salon of 1827–28. It is as if, in the 1820s, the In 1826, with his bold choice of allegory, Delacroix again
young artist was moving in various directions simultaneously; revitalized a genre, anticipating by nearly thirty years the “real
he would abandon works and then return to them, correcting allegory” of Gustave Courbet (see fig. 119). In fact, the paint-
the flaws he had identified or trying his hand at new genres. ing manages to escape the didacticism intrinsic to allegory
In 1826, when a philhellenic committee organized an exhibi- and its abstract vocabulary. An isolated woman, like the model
tion at the Galerie Lebrun as a benefit for the Greeks, the for Orphan Girl in the Cemetery in 1824 (see fig. 9), is sufficient
artist, who two years earlier had painted Massacres at Chios, to represent all the misfortunes of Greece. But the figure of
made the bold choice of presenting an allegory, a genre con- Greece is so laden with artistic references that viewers cannot
sidered outmoded, even anachronistic at the time. Greece on fail to decipher its symbolic meaning. The attitude of the
the Ruins of Missolonghi was an evocation of the nearly year- woman alludes to traditional Pietàs, and particularly to an
long resistance proudly mounted in 1825 by the residents of engraving by Marcantonio Raimondi after Raphael, The Virgin

“FAME IS NOT AN EMPTY WORD”: 1822–32 71

FIG. 26 July 28, 1830: Liberty Leading the People, 1830. Oil on canvas, 8 ft. 63⁄8 in. x 10 ft. 715⁄16 in. (2.6 x 3.2 m). Musée du Louvre, Paris (RF 129)

Weeping over the Body of the Dead Christ.¹²² In an early idea for A Barricade
the composition sketched on several sheets of a notebook in
the Louvre, Delacroix considered representing the desperate Delacroix used the idea of allegory again in Liberty, one of
figure standing over the corpses of her children. He was his most famous paintings (fig. 26). Exhibited at the Salon
inspired by the figure of the kneeling woman in the center of of 1831, the work was painted to celebrate the Revolution of
David’s The Intervention of the Sabine Women. Delacroix’s model 1830, which brought down the Bourbon king Charles X and
is said to have been a certain Laure, who posed for Woman put Louis-Philippe d’Orléans (r. 1830–48) on the throne.
with a Parrot (see cat. 33), but the artist ended up painting a On a barricade in the heart of Paris, a bare-breasted woman
more geometric face, which would be further idealized when advances, accompanied by the people she leads. She bran-
he rendered it in profile in Liberty Leading the People. dishes the blue, white, and red flag inherited from the

CAT. 26 Greece on the Ruins of Missolonghi, 1826

“FAME IS NOT AN EMPTY WORD”: 1822–32 73

Revolution of 1789 and adopted by the new king. In contrast or legend; the commander of the impending conflagration is a
to the static figure of a defeated and aggrieved Greece, the strange figment, a cross between a Byronian theatrical character
ill-fated heir of a brilliant ancient civilization, the energetic and an obscure figure from millennia past. As in Massacres at
Liberty is on the march; she is the surging hope of a brighter Chios, in which Delacroix transmuted contemporary newspa-
future. If in the 1820s the violence of civil war and urban per reports into bodies and spaces, the artist, stimulated by his
slaughters could have legitimately appeared to Delacroix as readings, relied on the power of his imagination to construct
events that had occurred in other times and places, that was the enormous scene. He gradually gave it weight and sub-
no longer the case after the revolution of July 1830. As he stance, as he added the realistic effects provided by his many
wrote to his nephew, Charles de Verninac: “Three days in the models and the accessories he gathered in the studio.
midst of shellfire and gunshots, people fighting everywhere. The construction of Liberty Leading the People, painted in
Someone like me, simply out for a walk, had as great a the wake of the revolution of 1830, took the opposite course.
chance of being hit by a bullet as the heroes of the moment The artist assembled his image from things he had seen, heard,
who marched on the enemy with pieces of iron inserted into and felt, things with a strong but only temporary presence:
broomsticks.”¹²³ Delacroix witnessed insurrection and the piles of paving stones, beams, and barrels that had been
phenomenon of the barricades, which had reappeared in Paris cleared away by the early days of August; corpses rapidly
in 1827. These modern forms of massacre invaded his own carried off, washed, and buried; the noise of alarm bells and
urban and social environment—the streets of Paris—and gunfire, which quickly fell silent. He then proceeded to
involved his compatriots, members of his own generation. For derealize and abstract these elements through smoke effects
the first time, Delacroix was confronted with the difficulty of similar to those that precede the descent of a deus ex machina
rendering a historical event to which he was a direct witness onstage. In the painting, the theatrical fog served to attenuate
and in which he played a part. How to synthesize multiple and the presence of the urban environment and cast into relief the
successive incidents in a single image? How to convey the human figures in the foreground. The very title, July 28, 1830:
complexity and ambiguity of the event, the tangle of facts and Liberty Leading the People, affirms the deliberate ambiguity of
interpretations, reality and imagination? the work, the universal message of which is conveyed through
Liberty Leading the People, which Delacroix nicknamed the commemoration of a specific historical event. Liberty,
“Barricade,” seems to concentrate the imaginary characteristics her feet and breasts bare, carries the Revolutionary tricolor—
of the barricade identified by Alain Corbin, beginning with its the blue, white, and red—rehabilitated by the new regime
ephemerality and deadliness: “The barricade, haunted by and serving as the composition’s chromatic fulcrum. Like the
promises of the future, is a temporary structure; it is quickly barricade, with its contradictory symbolic associations—it is
transformed into a tomb, a space outside time, where a funeral both a space of liberation and a tomb—Liberty is ambiguous:
ceremony seems to play out.”¹²⁴ Delacroix’s painting memori- half-goddess and half-woman of the people. “A fishwife,” some
alizes a fragile construction, spontaneous and transitory; it critics would howl, perhaps remembering the actions of
conveys what the barricades were like in July 1830 and simul- women during the earlier Revolution and disturbed by their
taneously evokes the tomb, the sacrificial altar, that these sites active roles on the most recent barricades.¹²⁵
became for the victims of the street battles, whatever their While Delacroix assigned a traditional female role—that
political camp. There is a disturbing resonance between the of mater dolorosa—to the allegorical figure in Greece on the
primitive, popular architecture of the barricade and the deadly Ruins of Missolonghi (cat. 26), five years later he had other
mound of humanity that both shapes and fuels the pyre in plans for Liberty. That figure, an homage to Gros’s Bonaparte
Sardanapalus. Employing the same pyramidal composition, on the Bridge at Arcole (1796; Musée National du Château,
Delacroix expressed in both paintings the idea of bodily sacri- Versailles), is leading the people. To be sure, all of her follow-
fice for the sake of freedom. But the works illustrate opposite ers are male and correspond to types, even stereotypes: a Paris
political extremes: on one hand, the civil liberty of a people urchin carrying a shoulder bag probably taken off a corpse;
united against the arbitrariness of government; on the other, a a student from the Ecole Polytechnique, with his beret; an
monstrous tyrant’s ultimate caprice, the freedom to destroy
himself. The pyre of Sardanapalus is merely the stuff of dreams FIG. 26 July 28, 1830: Liberty Leading the People, 1830, detail

74 DELACROIX
 FIG. 27The Sultan of Morocco, sketch, ca. 1832–33. Oil on canvas, 123⁄16 x 15¾ in. (31 x 40 cm). Musée des Beaux-
Arts, Dijon (inv. DG 86) (J 369)

industrial worker; a craftsman wearing a top hat; a peasant crushed. The motionless frontality of Massacres at Chios and
dressed in overalls and red flannel belt.¹²⁶ Unlike the unfortu- Greece on the Ruins of Missolonghi was intended to shock visitors
nate Greeks in Massacres at Chios, the common people of Paris to the Salon and appeal to their responsibility as citizens and
are not depicted in a state of paralysis, passively awaiting their human beings. The brutal intrusion of Liberty into the viewer’s
cruel fate: they are the authors of their own history. The force space, followed by her cohort of armed men and children,
of Delacroix’s composition stems from the artist’s capacity to leaves no room for hesitation: the time for reflection has given
depict the revolution as a perpetually ongoing process. way to the moment for action.
In his early paintings, Delacroix made significant use of Although the state purchased the painting, the subver-
both the fictive space of the image and the real space of the sive power of the image was so great that, by 1832, it was
gallery in which the painting would be seen.¹²⁷ In Liberty judged dangerous to the July Monarchy (the government of
Leading the People, he used that technique with formidable Louis-Philippe). The canvas was therefore removed from the
originality and effectiveness. Although the composition is walls of the Musée du Luxembourg. It then suffered the same
strictly and classically pyramidal, the flag, because it is cropped fate as masterpieces by David, Gros, and Girodet upon the
at the top, introduces an unexpected dynamic. Even more fall of the Empire: at the request of Hippolyte Royer- Collard,
striking is the forward movement of the figures—most nota- director of fine arts, the painting was placed in storage. In
bly, Liberty—who stride toward the spectator with extraordi- 1839 the regime, which was trying to suppress memories of
nary violence; the viewer is, in some sense, set upon. The how it had come into power, even agreed to return it to the
people, on the march toward their liberation, advance on artist. Owing to the revolution of 1848, the work resurfaced at
their audience, whose only options are to join in or be the Musée du Luxembourg; yet it was barely back on view

76 DELACROIX
FIG. 28Moroccan Interior: The Green Door, 1832. FIG. 29 Interior with Moorish Archways, 1832. Watercolor over graphite on paper, 97⁄16 x
Watercolor over graphite on paper, 95⁄8 x 715⁄16 in. 137⁄16 in. (23.9 x 34.2 cm). Musée du Louvre, Paris (RF 9266)
(24.4 x 20.2 cm). Musée du Louvre, Paris (RF 4528)

when it disappeared again into the storerooms, for fear that it support, like that of Adolphe Thiers, one of the first to sing
could be interpreted as an incitement to riot. Not until the his praises in 1822 and now an influential administrator.
Exposition Universelle of 1855, and with special dispensation At the end of 1831 comte Charles de Mornay made
from Emperor Napoleon III, was the painting once again Delacroix a proposal that would come as a godsend. Mornay
displayed to the public. asked Delacroix to accompany him on a diplomatic mission to
After the Salon of 1831, Delacroix faced the question of Morocco, where they were to meet with Sultan Moulay Abd-
how to continue, how to find new inspiration. In under ten er-Rahman in an effort to establish good relations with his
years he had explored and revitalized nearly every genre: country, an encounter that the artist would depict multiple
history painting, modern subjects, animal painting, portrai- times (see, for example, figs. 27, 37, and cat. 138). The journey,
ture, still life, literary subjects, the nude. He had also experi- which unfolded between January and July 1832, took the artist
mented in many ways, setting off in new directions, then to Meknes, with stops in Spain and, on the return trip, Algeria,
leaving them only to return to them later. Liberty Leading the where he visited Oran and, from June 25 to 28, Algiers. The trip
People was both his most balanced and most subversive compo- offered him the opportunity to step back and find new sources
sition, and the first one in which he had managed to evade the of inspiration through contact with the living antiquity he went
“facility of the brush.” His thirst for fame had been more than in search of: “I use part of my time for work, another consider-
satisfied at the Salon. Despite the repeated scandals and the able part to let myself live. But it never occurs to me to think
bitter failure of The Death of Sardanapalus, many of his works about my reputation or the Salon I had to miss, as they said.”¹²⁸
had been acquired by the state and hung in the Musée du
Luxembourg in anticipation of their eventual transfer to the
Louvre. In the eyes of the public, who were influenced by “Living Antiquity”
unprecedented developments in the press, he appeared—
very much in spite of himself—to be the leader of the “young The preeminence of the subject and the tension between the
innovators,” the “apostles of the ugly” whom the Neoclassical subject and execution of a work gave rise to another question,
critics violently denounced. His networks had become more namely, a painting’s purpose. Should a painting contain a
extensive, and he was beginning to benefit from very promising lesson, as Neoclassical doctrine proclaimed, or should it be

“FAME IS NOT AN EMPTY WORD”: 1822–32 77

 CAT. 83 Women of Algiers in Their Apartment, 1834

a feast for the eye above all else? Delacroix could not decide, prosaic subjects of Realism and what it put on display. In the
though he concluded his Journal with this remark: “This does same way, the subtle correction Delacroix made in his Journal
not mean that there need be no sense in it [painting].” He demonstrated his lack of sympathy for the doctrine of art for
hastened to add, however, “It is like beautiful verses.”¹²⁹ Such art’s sake. Nevertheless, his remark, in its very simplicity,
an idea, formulated in 1863, may of course have had Realism undermined the theoretical edifice on which the classical
as its target, at least in part. The artist, though he admired the system of painting had been built. That assault was at least as
direction of Courbet’s painting, rejected the supposedly important as the blows he struck against Realism. In fact, his

78 DELACROIX
reassessment of delectare versus docere, giving pleasure versus
teaching a lesson, in other words (at least in part), form
versus content, signifier versus signified, finally amounted to
a disruption of the traditional ideology of ut pictura poesis.
Delacroix, who belonged to a generation inculcated with that
ideology, could not go quite so far and, in his constant vacilla-
tions, his corrections of his ideas by means of nuance, he
attempted to stay on track. The classical system, based on the
association of the painter and the poet, obscured the fact that
the poet, at least before the advent of modern poetry, had to
make himself understood before seeking to please, whereas
the painter sometimes followed the reverse course.
Women of Algiers in Their Apartment (cat. 83), a painting
inspired by Delacroix’s trip to the Maghreb in 1832 and
exhibited at the Salon of 1834, played a decisive role in that
problem. Its imposing format is suggestive of a history painting
enlivened by an action, but its title (and hence its subject) is
that of a genre scene. Nevertheless, this particular Oriental
scene shuns all picturesqueness. In the entry for the Salon
program, Delacroix took care to substitute the Western word
“apartment” for “harem,” as if he were rejecting the exoticism
implied by his subject, as if he were seeking to minimize the
cultural distance, if not to create a form of empathy despite
that distance. That is one indication of the gap between the
seriousness of the representation of Women of Algiers and the
poetry of the bazaar that lay behind many Orientalist canvases
of the time. The work’s status is therefore indeterminate.
Although we are now accustomed to such fluidity, it disturbed
contemporaries, as Amédée Cantaloube noted: “Although his
Algerian Women seems at first sight to be only a genre study,
generalizing strains can be found in it.”¹³⁰ The opposition CAT. 82 Figure Study for “Women of Algiers,” 1833/34
between “genre study” and “generalizing strains” conveys the
tension between genre scenes and history painting. Delacroix
was aware of it; in fact, his experience of the Orient seems to conveys his astonishment and a kind of admiration. Delacroix
have been dominated by that tension. continued: “If the school of painting persists in proposing
In a letter of 1832 to his friend Pierret, he wrote: “Imagine, to the nurslings of the Muses the family of Priam and Atreus
my friend, what it is like to see figures like consuls—Catos, as their subjects, I am convinced—and you will be of the same
Brutuses—lying in the sun, walking in the streets, mending opinion—that it would be infinitely better for them to be sent
old shoes.” The painter thus arrived in the Maghreb with his as ship’s mates on the first vessel to the Barbary Coast than to
eyes filled with Western culture, believing he had found in wear down the classical territory of Rome any longer.”
Algeria and Morocco the “living antiquity” he had come In the canvases inspired by the Orient, Delacroix desired
looking for. Everywhere he saw Catos, Brutuses, Ciceros.¹³¹ to escape the picturesque, the superficiality of alluring descrip-
But he found them idling in the sun or cobbling shoes, at a tiveness, in order to restore the ideal that makes for true paint-
great remove from the heroization that time had bestowed on ing. When he evoked Catos lying in the sun, the expression
the Greeks and Romans. “Imagine, my friend, what it is . . .” must be taken seriously. The greatness of a work is not measured

“FAME IS NOT AN EMPTY WORD”: 1822–32 79

 CAT. 72 Jewish Woman of Tangier, 1832

solely by the nobility of its subject but by the nobility with the fine arts and inventor of a method of drawing: “Truth in
which it is rendered. Delacroix added geographical distance the arts is relative to the person who is writing, composing,
to chronological distance, which is the essence of the histori- etc.”¹³² Delacroix managed to avoid the repetitive and superfi-
cal subject. For him, “the thing seen” did not culminate in a cial picturesqueness of many painters who traveled to North
form of realistic representation, as it did for many of his fellow Africa, the Middle East, and the Ottoman Empire. The
artists, but in a poetic recomposition founded on the idealiz- Moroccan expedition was a liberation. Wherever he stopped,
ing work of memory. Therein lay its novelty. The subject was Delacroix, always with notebook in hand, made a sketch:
less in the rendering than in its perception by the artist. That costume details, heads, expressions, settings, landscapes,
idea runs through Delacroix’s entire career, from the remark horses, objects, trees, plants, relics of antiquity, languid
in his Journal in 1824, in which he declared that nothing was women (cats. 72–76, 78, 79, 81; fig. 30). He showed a particu-
true for him but the illusions he created, to a letter of June 8, lar fondness for doors and thresholds (see figs. 28, 29), which
1855, to his friend Marie-Elisabeth Cavé, wife of a director of seem to symbolize, as in Street in Meknes (see cat. 77), more

80 DELACROIX
 CAT. 77 Street in Meknes, 1832

than a form of mystery; rather, they suggest the discovery of Horse in a Landscape (cat. 97) and Arab Players (cat. 107). Visits
and encounter with the Other. to museums and copying the masters, the foundations of the
Delacroix thus accomplished an enormous amount of history painter’s art, were no longer the only sources of techni-
work from life and outdoors, often in watercolor, a medium cal inspiration: sometimes he had only to go out into the street.
with unpredictable effects that certainly sharpened his percep- In 1821–22 Delacroix had discovered the secret of depicting
tion. This intense activity played a fundamental role in his glistening drops of water by studying those that Rubens had
future reflections on the effects of observing the world—trees, painted on the bodies of the Nereids in The Landing of Maria de
flowers, tiger’s stripes, rocks, waves, sand, and so on—and on Medici at Marseilles (see fig. 4);¹³³ in the 1830s, if Charles Blanc
his inspiration and growing attention to the landscape, as is to be believed, it was upon observing a yellow taxi that the
indicated somewhat later by such works as Startled Arabian artist became aware of the role complementary colors play in

86 DELACROIX
shadows.¹³⁴ In the interval, he had the experience of travel. He a sensation partly liberated from the grip of the thing seen.
thus freed himself from the overly literary—and therefore Imagination thus played a major role in his art; his paintings
exceedingly narrative—aspects of his previous sources of would achieve the ideal that constitutes the greatness of his-
inspiration in order to devote more space to sensation, high- tory painting. Unfortunately, because Delacroix did not keep
lighting the tension between the subject and the motif. a journal while working on his large Oriental scenes, we
Above all, extensive note-taking allowed Delacroix to cannot follow precisely the idealizing process of memory
liberate himself not only from studio formulas but also from that was involved in their making. A slightly later text sheds
the studio itself and, consequently, from an imitative concep- light on the subject, however. On October 8, 1847, Delacroix
tion of the model. During his journey, he made no oil paint- compared a work by Claudius Jacquand to a painting by
ings, but he assembled a collection of motifs, a dictionary Narcisse-Virgile Diaz de la Peña. Jacquand’s painting, despite
of forms and subjects, that he would use for the rest of his its realistic rendering, seemed false to him; the meticulous
career. His manner of filling certain travel notebooks with imitation of the most insignificant objects led only to dullness
long lists of succinctly written images reveals his urgent need and clumsiness. In Diaz’s work, by contrast, “everything came
to record sensations in order to invoke them subsequently out of the painter’s imagination, but the memories are faithful
in all their richness: to life.” Regarding Jacquand, Delacroix concluded: “It is as if
this painting were done by a man incapable of even the slight-
The nights on the terraces est recollection of objects, for whom the detail he has before
The cranes on the houses of Alcassar his eyes is the only striking one.”¹³⁶ The passage of time, in
The nervousness that makes us go through the city bringing loss, opens up empty spaces into which many possi-
without stopping bilities, multiple interpretations, insinuate themselves.
The fury of the consul’s horse Women of Algiers (see cat. 83), Convulsionists of Tangier
The man it had half eaten, etc.¹³⁵ (see fig. 34), Moroccan Chieftain Receiving Tribute (cat. 92), and
Jewish Wedding in Morocco (see fig. 31), though inspired by
Extensive written descriptions would have run the risk of events that Delacroix had witnessed, avoid the descriptive
fixing the scene in place and reducing its capacity to inspire exoticism that marked the heyday of Orientalism; instead, they
in the future. offer reminiscences. Memory allowed him to reproduce
He would soon write lists of biblical and historical subjects the model while idealizing it in order to produce art from
in his Journal. Henceforth, not only books and engravings but nature rather than, like Jacquand, a prosaic copy. The work’s
also his own notebooks, which contained his memories— originality would be determined by the artist’s capacity to
whether recorded as drawings, watercolors, or in written form— be himself. The distance Delacroix introduced into Jewish
would trigger his imagination and awaken inspiration. This Wedding in Morocco, by viewing the principal figures from afar
process is illustrated in two late works, Guard-Room at Meknes and by representing in the foreground men viewed from the
(see fig. 94) and Arab Horses Fighting in a Stable (see cat. 144). back and partly immersed in shadow, leads viewers—as if they
were Western visitors—to the threshold of a house not com-
pletely open to them. Despite the abundance of costumes,
“Drowsy Reverie” jewelry, musical instruments, and exotic details, the scene
retains its mystery and avoids cumbersome pseudo-realistic
These paintings raise anew the question of the model and its description. Several critics used the term “reverie” to capture
function. When Delacroix turned to his travel notebooks the idealizing role of memory. Amédée Cantaloube, for exam-
after his return to Paris, he no longer had the model before ple, saw in Women of Algiers “an entirely foreign culture of
his eyes; he had only the memory of it. Just as while he was charming beings, listless in drowsy reverie.”¹³⁷ He had previ-
reading, Delacroix inserted himself into the empty spaces, the ously noted that “Delacroix, when dealing with the Orient,
blanks in the text, in order to reinvent the narrative through did not specialize in searching for local color or reproducing
painting, so, too, he would summon from the depths of his this or that picturesque corner in the interest of slavish exacti-
memory, using the precious material compiled during his trip, tude.”¹³⁸ The real is not the true.

“FAME IS NOT AN EMPTY WORD”: 1822–32 87

 FIG. 31 Jewish Wedding in Morocco, 1841. Oil on canvas, 415⁄16 x 555⁄16 in. (105 x 140.5 cm). Musée du Louvre, Paris (3825) (J 366)

The second version of Women of Algiers (fig. 32) provides

the most striking example of this phenomenon. Unlike the
painting of 1834, the version of 1849 appears to have been
conceived primarily as a reminiscence. In light of its
Rembrandtesque chiaroscuro, the painting could be called
“Souvenir of Morocco” (with a nod to Camille Corot, who
employed this formulation in several of his titles). The
women, observed from a greater distance than in the 1834
version, look like apparitions. They are presented theatrically
through the gesture of the black servant, who lifts the curtain
concealing them. This figure was the artist’s invention, even
in the first version of the painting, for which Delacroix posed
a Caucasian model in his studio (see cat. 82). Delacroix
painted a mystery to be unveiled, as it were. The instrument
of that unveiling is the slave, placed in the intermediate
space between the spectator and the Algerian women, who
strike poses as in a tableau vivant. Delacroix thus introduced FIG. 32 Women of Algiers in Their Apartment, 1849. Oil on canvas, 337⁄16 x
a narrative element that paradoxically evokes Charles 441⁄16 in. (85 x 112 cm). Musée Fabre, Montpellier (inv. 868.1.38) (J 382)

90 DELACROIX
Cournault’s description of a visit to a harem in 1832: “After Granted, the women painted by Delacroix are inactive. “It’s
crossing a dark hallway, when you enter into the part of the as if you were seeing flowers vegetate,” exclaimed Paul de
house reserved for them, the eye is truly dazzled by the bright Saint-Victor, adding: “No shadow of a thought ever crossed
light, by the fresh faces of women and children, who appear their faded cheeks; no passion ever hastened the rise and fall
all of a sudden in the midst of that heap of silk and gold.”¹³⁹ In of their heavy bosoms.”¹⁴⁴
this later version of the work, though the women are no more But might not these women be interesting in themselves?
active than in the canvas of 1834, the dramatic effect, obtained The title of the painting, in its combination of East and West,
by the contrasts of light, introduces a form of narration that introduced an ambiguity. The fusion between the promise of
seizes the beholder and distills the sense of time and action. a dreamlike, feminine, and Algerian distance and the prosaic
The painting functions as a kind of revelation, because its true notion of an “apartment” immerses these seemingly vacant
subject resides in the experience of a visitor entering a harem. women in a profuse luxury of place and finery. Although they
might seem foreign to us, they are less foreign than they appear
at first glance. The pose of the reclining figure on the left
“It Is Paint and Nothing More” brings to mind the ancient Sleeping Ariadne (Vatican Museums);
the Algerian woman embodies the living antiquity that dazzled
The first painting on this subject, which the artist exhibited the artist. These women resemble us; they are modern. The
at the Salon of 1834, was done in a completely different presence of a timepiece, so rarely remarked upon yet located
spirit. Women of Algiers can be seen as a manifesto. Executed almost in the middle of the painting, hanging from the bodice
shortly after Delacroix’s return to France, it tests the limits of of the woman in the center, expresses the idea both symboli-
the relationship between idea and execution, subject and cally and materially. The precious object does not date back
material object. Unlike Jewish Wedding in Morocco (fig. 31), to the dawn of time; it belongs to the nineteenth century. It is
inspired by a ceremony in Tangier that Delacroix attended on therefore the surroundings that introduce an element of
February 21, 1832, and unlike Convulsionists of Tangier (fig. 34) strangeness. The harem has been renamed an apartment, but
or even Portrait of Aspasie (see cat. 10), this work has a prob- there is nothing bourgeois about it: it has a luxury, a decora-
lematic subject.¹⁴⁰ What did the artist’s contemporaries see in tive profusion, that combines Arab faience, Oriental carpets,
it? Nothing. Nothing but paint. After a visit to the Louvre and Venetian mirrors, the art of the Maghreb and Western
in 1877, the Symbolist painter Fernand Khnopff exclaimed: imports juxtaposed.
“Of all the Delacroix paintings there, the one I like least is It is as if the spectator (most often male) were struggling
Women of Algiers. The color is beautiful, but there is nothing to accept the face-to-face encounter with these listless beings,
but that, and that is not enough: I need an action, a subject, who belie the image he might have had of a harem. Except for
something that moves me.”¹⁴¹ In other words, he needed a their apparent indolence, the women have none of the sexual
narrative subject. In the same years, Charles Blanc, in an allure of the odalisque, a Western male fantasy projected onto
obvious allusion to Delacroix, expressed a similar judgment: an Orient under invasion, and a subject Delacroix painted
“In passionately pursuing the triumph of color, the painter several times. With the trip to the Maghreb, he liberated
risks sacrificing action to spectacle. So what do our colorists himself from the literary clichés he had fallen for so brilliantly
do? They go to the Orient, to Egypt, to Morocco, to Spain.”¹⁴² in his early works. The women of Algiers are neither nude
The spectacle to which Blanc referred was clearly that of nor, worse, undressed, to satisfy the lustful, dominating gaze
color. In 1834, such a spectacle was already quite something; of the European male. Like Ingres’s Grande Odalisque (fig. 33),
it was new, as Blanc himself indicated, referring to Women which inspired Delacroix’s Woman with a Parrot (cat. 33),
of Algiers. “This essential piece is of interest only because of they neither offer their favors nor pretend to decline them.
the paint. . . . It is paint and nothing more; fresh, vigorous, Delacroix’s voyeurism, if it is voyeurism, is more apparent
energetically displayed.”¹⁴³ Delacroix had thus partly realized in the 1849 canvas—through the servant’s unveiling of the
his dream of spreading matter across the canvas as the ideal tableau—than in the scene of 1834. We may therefore wonder
of art, of dispensing with any bothersome mediation of a whether Baudelaire’s famous dictum “This little domestic
subject. At least that is how the painting was perceived. poem . . . gives off a strong whiff of a place of ill repute”

“FAME IS NOT AN EMPTY WORD”: 1822–32 91

 might not apply better to the painting in Montpellier, which
the poet may have seen as it was being completed.¹⁴⁵ However,
in his allusion to a place of ill repute, Baudelaire may have
been attempting to introduce the role of sexuality traditionally
associated with the harem, an aspect Delacroix engulfed in a
more general sensuality.
The more disturbing the power of woman, the less she is
seen. There is a certain paradox in considering this type of
blindness in the context of Delacroix’s opening up of the
harem to Western eyes—his conferral of the status of subject
on women who had been denied by male authority and by
FIG. 33 Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres (French, 1780–1867). Grande colonialism, which had violated their private realm. But per-
Odalisque, 1814. Oil on canvas, 3513⁄16 x 63¾ in. (91 x 162 cm). Musée du haps, as Patrick Vauday has aptly remarked, he did these things
Louvre, Paris (RF 1158) in an ambiguous manner.¹⁴⁶ The emptiness of the women’s

CAT. 33 Woman with a Parrot, 1827

92 DELACROIX
 FIG. 34 Convulsionists of Tangier, 1837–38. Oil on canvas, 375⁄8 x 505⁄8 in. (95.6 x 128.6 cm). Minneapolis Institute of Art, Bequest of
J. Jerome Hill (73.42.3) (J 360)

gaze reveals their effort to withdraw from the presence of the painting from telling a story. That is the reason, according to
intruder, whether the visitor to the harem—the colonizer— Alexandre-Gabriel Decamps, that the public saw it “only as a
or the male visitor to the Salon. The result is an absent pres- scene without emotion, a painting without an entry.”¹⁴⁸ The
ence, as if these women were blending into the decorative allusion to an “entry,” an explanatory text published in the
overexuberance of the canvas, obliging viewers to shift their Salon catalogue, is obviously metaphorical. Nonetheless,
attention to the material substance of the paint itself. the subjects of other Moroccan works by Delacroix—Jewish
That is what the artist wanted. Paul Signac pointed out Wedding in Morocco (fig. 31), Moroccan Chieftain Receiving
this inversion of the relationship between the women repre- Tribute (cat. 92), Convulsionists of Tangier (fig. 34)—were
sented and the frame, describing how their flesh dissolves into precisely explained in such entries, whereas, for the painting
the decorative continuum: “If the setting shines more bril- of 1834, the artist dispensed with all commentary that might
liantly than the jewels, it is because Delacroix made the have helped viewers interpret the image. Furthermore, he
most insignificant surfaces—fabrics, door hangings, carpets, clouded its meaning by using the term “apartment” rather
faience—shimmer by introducing a number of small details than “harem” in the title, thus merging Western and Eastern
and ornaments whose various colors come to quiet or excite realities. In this fashion, he accentuated the “display of paint,”
those parts of the painting, even as he painted almost mono- the essence of his art. When compared with Sardanapalus,
chrome flesh, because in real life, that is what it looks like.”¹⁴⁷ however, Women of Algiers shows a shift in Delacroix’s interest
This intentional weakening of the representation prevents the from the material substance of paint to color.

“FAME IS NOT AN EMPTY WORD”: 1822–32 93

“The Shades Interpenetrate Like Silks” is achieved, for instance, when a painter, instead of mixing a
yellow with a blue on his palette, juxtaposes a dab of blue and
In the painting of 1834, Delacroix succeeded in “attracting a dab of yellow directly on the canvas, following a method
interest by means of paint alone, unaided by a subject, which Delacroix would call flochetage. Some critics would denounce
can be interpreted in a thousand different ways and too often the technique for creating “the fuzzy effect of a tapestry
distracts the eye of casual viewers.”¹⁴⁹ As in The Death of viewed from the wrong side.”¹⁵¹ In Women of Algiers a good
Sardanapalus, but by opposite means, he managed to assert example can be found in the cushion on which the reclining
the power of the execution in the completed work and to figure at the left is resting. The extraordinary vibration of the
remind viewers that every painting consists of the substance of painting originates in the flochetage. Passages of pure color
paint itself. In The Death of Sardanapalus, that assertion came structure the composition: blue (the servant’s vest and the
about through struggle, in the competition between a violent, stripes of her dress, the silk garment worn by the figure in the
dark, and sensual subject and an overwrought execution that center, the patterned floor tiles); red (the servant’s dress and
flaunted itself in order to rise to the level of the representa- slippers, the doors and hangings, the patterns in the carpets),
tion. In Women of Algiers, by contrast, the weakening of the and yellow (the gold objects and textiles). The black skin
narrative allowed the execution to predominate almost natu- and turning motion of the servant, who is standing, provide a
rally, in a process that culminated in a form of abstraction— counterpoint to the milky flesh tones and immobility of the
the abstraction of color. Delacroix no longer sought to other women. Between these areas, the artist deployed a
emphasize the concrete materiality of his medium. In 1824 dizzying array of virtuoso contrasts between primary, second-
he had described his oil paints in terms of their physical ary, and complementary colors, enriching one another even
characteristics—as “fat” and “thick”; beginning with Women in the smallest details of the scarves and fabrics. The orange of
of Algiers, however, he would reduce the visibility of the the reclining woman’s bolero interacts with the complemen-
brushwork and play instead on the vibrations and the level tary blue of the garment’s lining, which mirrors the servant’s
of intensity of the color. His visit to Morocco, and probably, vest on the other side of the composition. In the foreground,
as Charles Blanc reported, his observation of moiré fabrics, the red babouche edged with gold seems to have been cast
led him to an awareness of the interweaving of colors and casually onto the green fringe of the carpet—that is, on its
the intensity that colors acquire when they interact with one complementary color.
another. The weaving metaphor is particularly apt. As Maxime Referring to Women of Algiers, Paul Cézanne declared
du Camp recounted in his Souvenirs littéraires: “I saw him that “the shades interpenetrate like silks” to such an extent
one evening near a table where there was a basket full of that the materiality of the objects dissolves in the symphony of
wool skeins. He picked up the skeins, grouped them, colors.¹⁵² The projected space of the painting, built on the
rearranged them up, divided them by shade, and thereby intricacy of these colored dabs, resembles the Persian carpets
produced extraordinary color effects. I heard him say: ‘The the painter considered the most beautiful of paintings, like
most beautiful paintings I have seen are certain Persian car- the fabrics he accumulated in his masterpiece. Charles Blanc
pets.’”¹⁵⁰ If the anecdote is true, the association of carpets chose the comparison of a shawl: “When we look at a cash-
and paintings once again raises the question of the place of mere shawl from a few steps away, we usually perceive shades
the subject. that are not in the fabric but are themselves composed inside
In Women of Algiers, Delacroix experimented intuitively our eye by the effect of reciprocal reactions of one shade with
and for the first time with the law of simultaneous contrast and another.”¹⁵³ The result is an infinite variety of color impres-
the optical mixture of complementary colors, which would be sions that language cannot describe: “In The Women of Algiers,
theorized by the chemist Michel Eugène Chevreul five years a blouse dotted with little flowers gives rise to a third, unde-
later, in 1839. This manner of paint application confers on the finable tone that the eye perceives but that language cannot
viewer an active role, since the mixing of colors occurs in the name precisely. A copyist will never obtain it if he tries to
eye and brain rather than on the palette. A more intense green compose it beforehand and deposit it on the canvas with the
tip of his brush.”¹⁵⁴ The painter’s art long preceded the art of
CAT. 83 Women of Algiers in Their Apartment, 1834, detail discourse; a painting doesn’t require a catalogue entry.

“FAME IS NOT AN EMPTY WORD”: 1822–32 95

Delacroix was right: when he made a beautiful painting, he certain Gobelins tapestry look. The reproach is well
was not writing down an idea. founded, but there is nothing very alarming about it.
Above all, flochetage entailed a departure from the classi- Gobelins tapestries are very beautiful, and the color is
cal notion of local color, which is predicated on the essence proof of the painter’s delicacy of feeling. In executing
of a thing. The principle assumes that every object possesses a a ceremonial piece, he gave it something of the orna-
natural color that can be isolated by precisely drawing the mental aspect of a wall hanging, which is altogether
model. Black is then added to that color to produce shadows, appropriate, since, after all, the painting will decorate
in a subtle chiaroscuro.¹⁵⁵ Delacroix realized that the addition a gallery.¹⁵⁷
of black only muddied the color because the shadows them-
selves are colored, resulting, as they do, from reflections. He The painting reduced to an objet d’art: that was the danger
seems to have made the discovery in Morocco, where in one Delacroix would try to ward off.
of his albums he wrote: “Adding black is not the same as After experimenting with the “facility of the brush” in
adding gray tones: it muddies the color, whose true gray tone The Death of Sardanapalus, and then moving away from that
is to be found in the opposite color; therefore, green shadow virtuosity, Delacroix became absorbed in the seductiveness of
in the red.”¹⁵⁶ Well- defined contours do not exist in nature, color only to master it more completely. The artist’s career, as
and the color of an object contaminates that of its neighbors. detailed in his writing, was composed of these experiments,
If local color is rooted in the search for an essence or in the advances, formulations, followed by rectifications, which, like
objective consistency of things, flochetage highlights the vibra- flochetage, constantly made the meaning in his paintings more
tion, even the instability, of the sensation. An object can be precise without ever providing a definitive interpretation.
valorized by its identity, but that identity is not realized in Therein lay Delacroix’s difficulty. After the brilliant feat of
isolation. It comes into being in the porousness between the Women of Algiers, for example, he returned even in the can-
object and its environment, like the red babouche on the vases inspired by his travels to privileging subject over execu-
carpet’s bold green fringe. tion (Convulsionists of Tangier, Jewish Wedding in Morocco) and,
The glorification of luminous color and matter was in the later version of Women of Algiers, to using chiaroscuro
Delacroix’s great discovery in Women of Algiers. The work has effects as a means of dramatization.
the value of a manifesto insofar as its subject is dissolved in the The simultaneous exhibition of Medea About to Kill Her
effects of color; the tension between the subject and its reali- Children (see cat. 94) and Convulsionists of Tangier (see fig. 34)
zation is here at its height. However, a classically trained artist at the Salon of 1838 seemed an attempt to resolve the dialectic
such as Delacroix knew that this boldness, this exhibition between color and subject. The confrontation between an
of color as matter, ran the risk of lowering the painting to ancient act of rage and a contemporary form of trance was
the ranks of the merely decorative, or to art for art’s sake. probably not coincidental. The images seem to represent two
The many allusions by his contemporaries to tapestries, car- aspects of a single passion expressed in two different “genres”
pets, and cashmere, though often laudatory, are proof of the at two historical moments. That is what Théophile Gautier
risk. In 1841 Gautier noted that Entry of the Crusaders into appeared to sense, without saying so explicitly, in his review
Constantinople (see fig. 36) had been maliciously compared to of the Salon: “It [the Medea] is an ancient subject treated with
a Gobelins tapestry: modern intelligence using forms more human than ideal. That
contrast has a piquancy to it, and the most worn- out subjects in
Baldwin elicits the strongest criticism, and its success the world would take on a youthful vitality and novelty if under-
is the most contested: it is criticized primarily for a stood in that way. There is a complete revolution in that idea.”¹⁵⁸

96 DELACROIX
 Driven to Greatness: 1833–54

Delacroix’s first decade as an artist can be understood reason- had slowed. After the first years of the reign of King Louis-
ably well through his participation in the Salon, the question Philippe, Delacroix lost interest in painting the disasters of
of originality, the stakes of fame, and his desire to master war of his time and the spirit of the revolutions that were
and combine multiple pictorial genres. By contrast, the strate- unsettling Europe’s political order; the Revolutions of 1848–
gies that guided his prolific artistic output after 1832 are more 49 were not reflected in his paintings. While still engaging his
difficult to decipher. In the second decade, Delacroix contin- favorite literary references—Byron, Dante, Shakespeare, Scott,
ued to work simultaneously in all the genres he had mastered Tasso—he focused the greater part of his research on iconog-
in the 1820s: political and biblical history, battle scenes, poetry raphy associated with the sixteenth- and seventeenth- century
and theater, animal pictures, Moroccan genre scenes, por- pictorial traditions of France, Italy, and the Low Countries.
traits, and still lifes. He further expanded his repertoire while These included martyrdoms and miracles taken from the
executing the large decorative projects that absorbed him Gospels and lives of the saints, which featured in more than
beginning in 1833. From that point forward he proved himself seventy paintings between 1832 and 1863; attributes of virtue
in the loftiest categories of academic painting—allegory, myth, drawn from biographies of illustrious men of antiquity; fables
and ancient history—as well as their counterpoint, ornamental of Greek mythology (Hesiod, Ovid); and episodes from
painting (floral compositions and large-scale murals). Thus it chivalric romances of the Renaissance (Ariosto, Tasso). All
was that Delacroix distinguished himself as an all-around these subjects occupied a much larger place in Delacroix’s
genius in the second half of the 1830s (cat. 93). He was forty oeuvre in the years after 1832 than they had during his first
and his career spanned just fifteen years when Théophile decade as an artist.
Gautier lauded him in his review of the Salon of 1838: The traditional character of his subjects was combined
with a growing eclecticism in his compositions. Delacroix
M. Eugène Delacroix is one of the most adventurous devoted new attention to studying the great geniuses of the
talents of the time; he has a certain restlessness, a past, seemingly at the expense of his rivalries with contempo-
certain feverish genius, that impels him to experiment raries. From then on, he emulated revered painters as diverse
in all sorts of ways; no one has looked more deeply as Rubens, Titian, Veronese, Rembrandt, Poussin, and
into himself. . . . M. Eugène Delacroix, in his desire Raphael, whose work would inform his large decorative proj-
to achieve perfection, has attempted every form, ects and his reflections on art. His increasingly transparent
every style, and every color; there is no genre he has quotation of painterly references began to be remarked upon
touched without leaving some noble and luminous in the mid-1830s. Gustave Planche, for example, on seeing
trace. Few painters have covered as vast a field as Saint Sebastian Tended by the Holy Women (see cat. 90) at the
M. Delacroix; his oeuvre is already nearly as impres- Salon of 1836, rightly raised questions about his disparate
sive as that of a golden-age Venetian. He has done choices, though he was sympathetic to them:
frescoes, monumental works, history paintings, genre
paintings, battle scenes, interiors, horses as skillfully This year’s color obviously recalls Titian; last year,
as Gericault, lions and tigers as fine as those of Barye Christ on the Cross brought to mind Rubens; in 1834,
or Desportes.¹ Women of Algiers was reminiscent of Veronese. How
does M. Delacroix pursue with such tireless persever-
Gautier’s enthusiastic description masks, however, the ance both imitation and originality? How, even while
change in the relative importance of the different categories retaining the individuality and indelible characteristics
within Delacroix’s iconographic repertoire. In fact, the artist’s of his own thought, does he reproduce by turns the
search for original painting subjects, which up until then he Flemish style and the Venetian style? Why does he
had drawn largely from recent literature or political history, sometimes select Veronese and sometimes Titian from

97
 among the Venetian masters? Is it not because of his
immoderate desire to do things well? Must we not
believe that M. Delacroix, sincere in each of his works,
in every ambition he realizes, is never satisfied with
himself and is perpetually seeking a new manner, as if
he had not yet found one? Is that not the conclusion
that arises naturally in the presence of the artist’s
works, so numerous and so varied?²

What is interesting about Planche’s questioning is that it

conveys the impression that, beginning in 1834, Delacroix’s
submissions to the Salons did not reflect as consistent a plan
as did the works he had exhibited at the Salons of the 1820s.
(The exception was the Battle of Nancy, see cat. 69, commis-
sioned in 1828 and a product of its time.) The later works
display a bewildering diversity of textual and stylistic refer-
ences, as can be seen by examining Delacroix’s participation
at the Salons held between 1833 and 1849.
After his trip to Morocco in the first half of 1832, the
artist had barely enough time to submit a few watercolors and
portraits to the Salon of 1833. His return to history painting
was evident in 1834, with Women of Algiers in Their Apartment,
a large-format Moroccan genre scene done in the manner of
Veronese (see cat. 83), and in 1835, with Christ on the Cross, his
first Christian martyrdom, which was greatly influenced by
Rubens (see cat. 85). The following year, Delacroix exhibited
a second Christian martyrdom, Saint Sebastian, in which cer-
FIG. 35The Justice of Trajan, 1840. Oil on canvas, 16 ft. 15⁄16 in. x 12 ft. 99⁄16 in.
tain motifs were indebted to Michelangelo and Rubens but (4.9 x 3.9 m). Musée des Beaux-Arts, Rouen (inv. D 1844.1) (J 271)
the overall composition of which is usually associated with
Venetian influence (see cat. 90). He showed only one work at
the Salon of 1837, Battle of Taillebourg, a large picture commis- and 1841, the splendor of Delacroix’s palette burst forth, and
sioned for the Musée de l’Histoire de France at Versailles, the critics were enchanted by his remarkably rich, luminous
clearly inspired by Rubens’s Battle of the Amazons (1615; Alte grandes machines. The Salon of 1840 was dominated by the
Pinakothek, Munich). This was followed in 1838 by a scene spectacular Justice of Trajan (fig. 35), an ancient subject that
from Greek mythology, Medea About to Kill Her Children (see Delacroix had discovered in Byron and treated with the elo-
cat. 94), in which critics noted a curious mix of Correggio, quence of Veronese and Rubens. This was followed in 1841 by
Michelangelo, and Rembrandt. It was accompanied by a sort three submissions: Entry of the Crusaders into Constantinople
of genre painting, Convulsionists of Tangier, a large outdoor (fig. 36), his second medieval history painting commissioned
Moroccan scene (see fig. 34). for Versailles; a Byronian Shipwreck (see cat. 98) that evoked
The following year, at the Salon of 1839, both of Gericault and embodied the results of Delacroix’s own first
Delacroix’s submissions drew on Shakespearean sources, but seascape studies; and a genre scene, Jewish Wedding in Morocco,
to very different effect. The open, well-balanced Hamlet and in which architecture plays a leading role (see fig. 31).
Horatio in the Graveyard, his second painted version of the Troubled by ill health and absorbed in major decorative
subject (cat. 96), was set against the monumentality of the works, Delacroix abstained from exhibiting for three years in
Caravaggesque Cleopatra and the Peasant (see cat. 95). In 1840 a row, returning in 1845 with large compositions that seemed

DRIVEN TO GREATNESS: 1833–54 99

 Entry of the Crusaders into Constantinople, 1840. Oil on canvas, 13 ft. 57⁄16 in. x 16 ft. 41⁄16 in. (4.1 x 5 m). Musée du
FIG. 36
Louvre, Paris (3821) (J 274)

solemn and somber compared with those he had shown the a large, austere, neo- Caravaggesque meditation (see
Salons of 1840 and 1841: Last Words of Marcus Aurelius (1844; cat. 106); and, even more remarkable in the highly charged
Musée des Beaux-Arts, Lyon), a tribute to the great Roman political context of the Salon of 1849, the darkest, most
emperor and Stoic in which Delacroix measured himself against Rembrandtesque version of the Women of Algiers in Their
Poussin’s Death of Germanicus (1627; Minneapolis Institute of Apartment (see fig. 32), accompanied by an Othello and
Art) and David’s Death of Socrates (1787; Metropolitan Desdemona imbued with the same atmosphere of mystery (see
Museum); The Sultan of Morocco and His Entourage (fig. 37; fig. 116). These two submissions contrasted sharply with a pair
see also cat. 138), with a static character, majesty, and silence of neo-Baroque floral compositions, opulent and densely
that are diametrically opposed to the turmoil in The Justice of filled (see cats. 109, 110). A series comprising paintings as
Trajan; and finally, a Cumaean Sibyl inspired by Dante and heterogeneous as these came across as incomprehensible,
a Mary Magdalene in the Wilderness, each massive, sculptural, impossible to relate to a unified, well-thought- out strategy: the
and enigmatic in its way (see fig. 122). A change of course was submissions to the Salon were obviously inconsistent from
discernible in the Salons of 1846 and 1847: Delacroix dis- one year to the next. However, the best-informed critics
played only small paintings invoking his memories of Morocco understood that Delacroix was employing at least three differ-
and the Romantic literary references of his youth—Shakespeare, ent strategies at once: the transposition and elaboration of
Scott, Byron, Goethe—sometimes reinterpreted after old experiments carried out in the large decorative programs;
lithographs. The Salon of 1848 offered additional surprises, ceaseless dialogue with Rubens; and further development of
with the exhibition of The Lamentation (Christ at the Tomb), his own repertoire of favorite motifs.

100 DELACROIX
 FIG. 38 Eastern wall of the Salon du Roi, Assemblée Nationale (Palais Bourbon), Paris, featuring the frieze painting War (Bellum) and
the pier paintings The Seine (Sequana) and The Rhone (Rhodanus), 1833–37. Oil and wax on plaster

A number of the historical compositions that Delacroix (see fig. 79), The Entombment of Christ—and profane—The
presented at the Salon can be understood as the visible por- Lion Hunt, Hippopotamus and Crocodile Hunt (see fig. 59),
tion of a creative output with a center of gravity that lay else- Abduction of the Daughters of Leucippus (see fig. 101), The Battle
where—in the monumental decorative works. Enormous but of the Amazons.
largely inaccessible, these projects were an essential source of A third driving force of his art was superimposed on
renewal in his painting. Gautier, Planche, and an anonymous the first two. The recurrence of the same subjects in succes-
critic at L’artiste, likely tipped off by the painter, seem to have sive submissions to the Salon reveals that an increasing share
been the first to realize this. of Delacroix’s output followed the principle of repetition
The second thread Delacroix pursued was a dialogue with variations. That is, the artist reprised his own earlier
with the masters, particularly Rubens, who was for him the subjects and motifs, most of which originated in the late
absolute and infinitely prolific master. Delacroix was stimu- 1820s and early 1830s. Saint Sebastian, for example, exists in no
lated by every new encounter with Rubens’s masterpieces fewer than six versions. Such extensive self-referentiality adds
during his visits to French museums in Nancy, Bordeaux, and to the complication of interpreting Delacroix’s work. The
Rouen and in Belgian churches, but also through engravings. “reprises,” usually in small formats, were no doubt a form of
He entered into competition with the Flemish master and relaxation for the painter, who enjoyed retracing his own
regularly sought to cross swords with him by reinterpreting steps, free of competition, to develop an early idea along new
his seminal works, both religious—Christ on the Cross, Christ lines. They also satisfied the demand of the burgeoning art
at the Column (The Flagellation), Christ Calming the Sea market and thus served a commercial purpose. On a deeper

102 DELACROIX
level, however, it seems that they were prompted by a reflex- The passion that enabled him to surmount so many obstacles
ive proclivity characteristic of the now-mature artist, who was cannot be explained solely by the prestigious nature of the
alert to the passage of time and its effect on his oeuvre. commissions. Mural painting resonated deeply with his new
ambitions, which were those of a mature artist aware that the
strategy of his early years, which focused almost exclusively on
The Canvas and the Wall the Salon, no longer sufficed.
The failure of The Death of Sardanapalus (see fig. 20) at
Delacroix’s interest in large mural decoration, now well the Salon of 1827–28 is usually seen as having broken the
known, arose in the 1830s. As early as 1830–31, he competed momentum of Delacroix’s career, provoking a phase of dis-
for the opportunity to decorate the wall behind the rostrum of couragement that lasted several years. Then came the
the Chamber of Deputies in the Palais Bourbon, seat of the Revolution of July 1830, which rid him of the enmity of the
Assemblée Nationale, though the sketch he submitted was vicomte Sosthènes de La Rochefoucauld, director of fine arts,
rejected (see cat. 70). In 1838 the decoration for the Salon du followed by the trip to Morocco in 1832, which opened up
Roi (fig. 38), entrusted to the artist five years earlier, had only new perspectives. These events have long been understood as
just been completed when he was awarded a commission for the positive, liberating factors that enabled the artist to strike
the decoration of the library in the Chamber of Deputies
(fig. 39). The assignment resulted from his efforts to secure a
project “that would satisfy my need to work big, [a need]
which becomes insistent once you’ve had a taste of it,”³ and it
occupied him for a decade. Its execution was slowed by his
acceptance in 1840 of two additional mural projects: the
cupola and hemicycle of the Peers’ Library at the Palais du
Luxembourg (fig. 40) and the Chapel of the Virgin at
the church of Saint-Denys- du-Saint-Sacrement (see fig. 48),
commissioned by the prefecture of the Seine. The same
year, Delacroix accepted a commission to create cartoons for
stained-glass windows for the Manufacture Nationale de
Sèvres. During the advent of the Second Republic, between
1848 and 1851, he even tried having himself named director of
the manufacture des Gobelins.⁴ Under the republican govern-
ment led by Napoleon Bonaparte, he received commissions
for two Parisian projects: a section of the ceiling in the
Louvre’s Gallery of Apollo (1849–51; see fig. 53) and a chapel
in the church of Saint-Sulpice (1849–61; see figs. 69, 70). In
addition, the City of Paris asked him to decorate a salon in the
Hôtel de Ville (1851–54).
Plagued by frequent illness from 1842 onward, Delacroix
was obliged to delegate to assistants parts of the considerable
labor required to execute these projects. It was the first time
he had taken such a step. Inevitably, there were disagreements
with the architects, patrons, and his own assistants, and the
work took a toll on his fragile constitution. Despite all that, and
despite the decidedly poor financial compensation he received FIG. 39 Interior view of the Deputies’ Library, Assemblée Nationale (Palais
when compared to what he earned for his highly prized small Bourbon), Paris, featuring ceiling paintings by Delacroix, 1841–47. Oil
paintings, Delacroix left none of these undertakings unfinished. and wax on plaster

DRIVEN TO GREATNESS: 1833–54 103

FIG. 40 Dante and the Spirits of the Great, 1841–45. Diam. 22 ft. 4 in. (6.8 m). Detail of cupola of the Peers’ Library, Palais du Luxembourg, Paris

out in new directions. However, careful examination of streak of good fortune ended in 1828, when the department of
Delacroix’s early relations with the administration leads to a museums refused to purchase The Death of Sardanapalus or any
different hypothesis, one that attributes the leveling off in the of his other submissions to the Salon of 1827–28. The painter
artist’s career trajectory not to supposed hostility from the had surely gone too far in asserting his artistic singularity, but
department of museums under Charles X but to something the refusal was based above all else on the administration’s
rather different. belief that Delacroix was sufficiently well represented at the
In fact, the painter had achieved his professional objec- Musée du Luxembourg and found it more judicious to con-
tives at a very young age and as a result quickly found himself tinue its support in the form of commissions. It did so gener-
at an impasse. It was the young Delacroix’s ambition to ously; however, commissions imposed significant constraints
achieve glory by having his works exhibited in museums while and resulted in the dispersal of his works. Each commission
preserving his originality through his participation at the was for a specific site and came with a preselected subject,
Salons. He had the extraordinary privilege of having one of format, and deadline for completion. Delacroix was loath to
his paintings admitted to the Musée Royal des Artistes Vivantes see his major history paintings sent off to museums far from
the first time he participated at the Salon, in 1822. At the age Paris (see cat. 69) or to locations in the capital that were
of twenty-four, ahead of some of his most promising fellow relatively inaccessible. For example, the third room of the
artists from Guérin’s studio (Théodore Gericault, Léon Conseil d’Etat at the Louvre, where Emperor Justinian, commis-
Cogniet), Delacroix secured a place alongside David, sioned in 1826 (see cat. 28), was displayed, was open to the
Prud’hon, and Girodet at the Musée du Luxembourg. The public for only a few days during the Salon of 1827–28, and
museum acquired a second work by Delacroix in 1824. This Christ in the Garden of Olives (see cat. 17) was hung high in the

104 DELACROIX
 CAT. 68 The Battle of Poitiers, 1830

transept of the church of Saint-Paul-Saint-Louis.⁵ In the case Salons of 1831 (Liberty Leading the People) and 1834 (Women of
of one private commission, The Battle of Poitiers (cat. 68), the Algiers in Their Apartment) (cat. 83). The bright spell was
artist was obliged to take legal means to obtain the return of short, however. Liberty Leading the People was quickly relegated
the painting after his patron, the duchesse de Berry, was to storage for political reasons, and Delacroix failed to win the
forced into exile. competition of 1830–31 for two historical compositions des-
Although the change of regime in 1830 and the trip to tined for the Chamber of Deputies (cat. 70). In the end, the
Morocco in 1832 provided him with breathing room, they works by Delacroix that the state acquired after 1834 were
were not sufficient to revitalize his art over the long term. most often bought by the Ministère de l’Intérieur and not by
In the early days of the July Monarchy Delacroix hoped once the intendance de la Liste civile, which oversaw acquisitions
again that he would see more of his history paintings enter the selected by the king for the department of the Musée du
Musée du Luxembourg. He was not disappointed; the depart- Louvre and the Musée du Luxembourg. Because the Ministère
ment of museums made purchases at the conclusion of the de l’Intérieur was responsible for procuring works of art for

DRIVEN TO GREATNESS: 1833–54 105

 Delacroix spoke from experience: he had already observed
the deterioration of Christ in the Garden of Olives (cat. 17),
which had hung in the transept of the church of Saint-Paul-
Saint-Louis since its completion. In 1837 Théophile Thoré
reported that “the moisture [was] beginning to dull the col-
ors.”⁷ In 1855, when it had become “barely visible under the
layers of mold and varnish,” Delacroix restored it in order to
display it at the Exposition Universelle. He was afraid that, by
returning it to the church, “given the height at which it [was]
placed and the difficulty of maintaining it, it [would] perish
within a few years.”⁸
Does that explain why for ten years, between 1837 and
1846, Delacroix chose not to display large religious composi-
tions at the Salon? His strategy at least ensured that paintings
acquired by the Ministère de l’Intérieur would be sent to
CAT. 70 Boissy d’Anglas at the Convention, sketch, 1831 museums and not churches. In 1838, the year after he exhib-
ited the Battle of Taillebourg, commissioned for the museum
at Versailles, Delacroix submitted Medea About to Kill Her
provincial churches and museums, the large compositions by Children (see cat. 94), which the ministry bought and sent to
Delacroix that the administration purchased were systemati- the Palais des Beaux-Arts, Lille. At first, the artist protested
cally sent away from Paris. Christ on the Cross (see cat. 85) was vehemently, insisting that the work be purchased by the inten-
dispatched to the church of Saint-Paterne in Vannes, and Saint dance de la Liste civile for the Musée du Luxembourg. The
Sebastian (see cat. 90) was acquired for the church of Saint- Ministère de l’Intérieur, no longer run by Adolphe Thiers but
Michel in Nantua at the request of a deputy from the depart- by the comte Duchâtel, refused to give in. It merely agreed to
ment of Ain. Delacroix was sorry to see these scenes of have the painting lent to the Paris museum for a year before
martyrdom transported to churches. He had not intended being sent permanently to Lille.
them for religious institutions but rather to be placed in Delacroix expressed his resentment to his friend
museums, next to masterpieces of religious art. Furthermore, Edmond Cavé, head of the division des Belles-Lettres et des
he worried about the damage his works would suffer at the Arts à l’Intérieur at the Ministère de l’Intérieur: “I accept the
hands of uncomprehending clergy and in the poor atmo- proposal you were kind enough to make on the minister’s
spheric conditions of churches. behalf, though the temporary exhibition at the Musée du
These fears were confirmed some twenty-five years later, Luxembourg far from fulfills my objective, which was to ensure
as documented in an alarmist letter Delacroix sent to the state that the painting would not leave Paris.”⁹ The next acquisition
finance minister, Achille Fould: by the Ministère de l’Intérieur was the occasion for further
wrangling: The Justice of Trajan (see fig. 35), exhibited at the
I have learned that this work [Christ on the Cross, Salon of 1840, was acquired two years later for the Musée
cat. 85], long placed in a dark, damp chapel of the des Beaux-Arts, Bordeaux. Delacroix was fond of the city,
church [Saint-Paterne, Vannes], is threatened with where his father had been prefect and where his elder brother
complete destruction if the situation continues. I take lived, but he lacked confidence in the upkeep of the museum’s
the liberty of appealing to Your Excellency, to ask if facilities and believed the site was too far from Paris. He seized
it might be possible to have the city return the threat- the initiative, convincing the mayor of Bordeaux to trade the
ened painting to Paris. . . . In addition, it was suggested painting for another, and once more appealed to Cavé: “I saw
to me that the unfavorable place allotted to my painting the mayor of Bordeaux, who would be open to an exchange
might be explained by a Mary Magdalene figure that for the Trajan. You know how much I desire that, in the first
the clergy did not find sufficiently draped.⁶ place, it go to Rouen, and, in the second, that it not go to

106 DELACROIX
Bordeaux. I’m convinced they do not even have a place high children.”¹⁴ Thus, whenever he could, he reserved the right
enough for it. The painting would be left in a corner, rolled to do the necessary retouching of his works himself. In 1860
up for who knows how long, as others have been that he treated The Barque of Dante, the cracks of which, caused
deserved better.”¹⁰ He won his case and had The Justice of by differences in drying times of the layers of paint, had
Trajan assigned to the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Rouen. become obtrusive.¹⁵
Likewise, in 1845, when the Ministère de l’Intérieur Baudelaire provided a revealing account of Delacroix’s
announced its intention to acquire Last Words of Marcus concerns:
Aurelius for the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Toulouse, Delacroix,
not satisfied with that painting, arranged with Cavé to substi- One of the painter’s major preoccupations in his final
tute the Sultan of Morocco (see fig. 37), which had just been years was the judgment of posterity and the uncertain
exhibited at the Salon of 1845.¹¹ After 1834, when the state material durability of his works. Sometimes his sensitive
purchased its last Delacroix painting for the Musée du imagination was inflamed by the idea of immortal glory,
Luxembourg, the artist was able to see only one more of his sometimes he spoke bitterly of the fragility of canvases
works enter that museum: Jewish Wedding in Morocco (see and paint. On other occasions he mentioned with envy
fig. 31). The painting was donated by the crown prince, the the old masters—nearly all of them—who had the good
duc d’Orléans, a major patron of the arts and the owner of fortune of having their paintings reproduced by skillful
Delacroix’s The Murder of the Bishop of Liège (cat. 64), among engravers . . . and he ardently regretted not having found
other works by the artist, immediately after he purchased it. such a translator of his own works. The brittleness of
As he gained experience, Delacroix was increasingly paintings, when compared to the solidity of prints, was
concerned about the destination of his works and their preser- one of the habitual themes of his conversation.¹⁶
vation. He had learned about the fragility of oils painted on
canvas, their sensitivity to variations in atmospheric conditions Baudelaire had heard Delacroix speak on these matters; he
and their vulnerability to damage through mishandling. had also read an article Delacroix had published on Prud’hon,
He was therefore deeply affected by the degraded state of whose paintings had deteriorated considerably over time: “All
The Death of Sardanapalus (see fig. 20), which he saw at the the genius in the world cannot prevent a varnish from yellow-
Château des Prés d’Ecoublay in September 1849 following ing, a thin coat of paint from disappearing. . . . All the ele-
the death of its owner, Daniel Wilson. He worried about his ments are the enemies of painting: air and sun, dryness and
“poor painting, which will meet who knows what fate and dampness. And these are not even the cruelest. An ignorant
whose condition at the moment is deplorable: the canvas is retoucher often finishes in a single stroke the work of destruc-
loose; the bottom seam is split along its entire length and held tion that the centuries have not completed.”¹⁷
together here and there by stitches.”¹² At the end of his life, Confronted with the fateful fragility of his paintings on
he realized that even museums were no guarantee against risk, canvas and frustrated by their systematic and uncontrollable
and that botched restorations were something to fear. He dispersal, Delacroix suffered another spell of inertia. In his
concurred with the disapproval expressed by some members view, the limits of easel painting lay paradoxically in the abso-
of the press when Frédéric Villot, curator of paintings at the lute freedom the practice afforded: the artist, alone in his
Louvre—and, as it happened, a friend of Delacroix’s— studio, nose to the canvas, has only self- discipline to prevent
undertook a contested restoration of Veronese’s Wedding at him from spoiling the work at hand. He can return to it indefi-
Cana in 1853.¹³ A year later, Delacroix learned that his own nitely, refining or complicating the composition, superimpos-
masterpiece had been stripped of its varnish: “[Louis d’] ing layers of oil and glaze, but he risks losing his way. Over
Arnoux came by during the day. . . . He says that the Massacre the years, Delacroix became persuaded that an artist’s first
[of Chios] was not improved by having its varnish removed; impulse was the right one and that the pleasure of execution
without having seen it, I am almost of the same opinion. Like was a trap that threatened a painting’s unity and originating
the Veronese, the painting will have lost the transparency of idea. He was stimulated by the constraints of the large decora-
its shadows, as is almost bound to happen. Haro . . . spoiled tive works, which required clean, rapid execution and a dis-
the portraits by Uncle Riesener of my two brothers as tanced view. A passage from his Journal written in 1847, as he

DRIVEN TO GREATNESS: 1833–54 107

was completing the decoration for the library of the Palais du Luxembourg were viewed mainly by representatives of the
Bourbon, attests to this: nation who went to the library to read, learn, and meditate
on the meaning of history, taking the great men of the past as
I painted the small figure of the man fallen forward, their models and finding inspiration in them when fashioning
pierced by an arrow, in a few instants. That is the way their laws. In these locations, painting became the vehicle of a
one ought to do painted sketches that would then moral and historical discourse that called for the greatest
have the freedom and freshness of a jotting (croquis). intelligibility even as it assured the serenity of the surround-
Small paintings annoy me, bore me. Easel paintings do ings. By contrast, in the Chapel of the Virgin at Saint-Denys-
too, even large ones done in the studio. You wear du-Saint-Sacrement, practicing Christians, imploring divine
yourself out ruining them. One should put into large assistance, gave free rein to their emotions and devotional
canvases all the fire that usually goes only onto walls. fervor. There, the register of Delacroix’s painting was one of
Cournault told me that is what Rubens did in his Battle somber pathos and high contrast. Finally, public spaces of
of Ivry in Florence.¹⁸ palaces, designed to welcome the eminent guests of a city or
parliament, had to convey the solemnity, pride, and joy result-
It is therefore clear why Delacroix’s first large decorative ing from good government.
project, entrusted to him in 1833, was his road to Damascus: it Delacroix’s taste for large decorative projects was height-
revitalized him in the profound and lasting way that he needed. ened by the notion that he was intervening physically in a
Mural painting satisfied Delacroix’s desire to move about monumental ensemble to which illustrious masters of the past
in his paintings, his “need to work big,” while guaranteeing had contributed, and where his own painting could freely
him stability and continuity.¹⁹ He was assured that his paintings engage in dialogue with theirs. That relationship was even
would remain in place and long outlast him, provided that the stronger and more immediate than in a museum. In the
building that sheltered them was sound, located in the historic French royal collections, works by living artists were strictly
heart of Paris, and linked to a prestigious institution, whether separated from those of artists who had died; their produc-
the state (Palais Bourbon, Palais du Luxembourg, Palais du tions were housed in institutions on opposite sides of the
Louvre), the church (Saint-Denys- du-Saint-Sacrement, Saint- Seine. While working in the Palais du Luxembourg, Delacroix
Sulpice), or the city itself (Hôtel de Ville). It must have was conscious of the fact that he was the successor of Philippe
seemed to him that by integrating his paintings morally and de Champaigne and, even more, of his idol, Rubens. But his
materially into a great monument of Paris, he would achieve most immediate link to tradition occurred when he painted,
an immortality comparable to that offered by a museum. starting in 1850, the central compartment of the ceiling of
The large decorative projects compelled him to innovate the Gallery of Apollo at the Louvre: the work was at the heart
on a regular basis, and for this reason, too, they were stimulat- of a painted, sculpted, and ornamental program overseen two
ing. Every site, by virtue of its architectural configuration centuries earlier by Charles Le Brun, the premier peintre of
(caissons, cupola, apse, hemicycle), function (library, gallery, Louis XIV.
chapel, vestibule, reception hall), and preexisting artistic Delacroix’s activity as a decorative painter, as demanding
features, required him to devise a tailor-made solution and as it was, did not put an end to his work as an easel painter.
explore new iconographic territory. He also had to evaluate He pursued the two practices simultaneously, believing they
carefully how the works would be received. The paintings for were complementary. In fact, the large decorative murals—
the Salon and the museum, seen frontally and fairly close up, except for those in churches, which were sometimes poorly
dramatically engaged a diverse, inquisitive audience made up lit—were not easily accessible. The decorations done for the
of art critics and the urban public. Paintings in palaces and Palais Bourbon or the Palais du Luxembourg, apart from the
churches, seen from a greater distance, tower over and envelop few days after their unveiling when they were discussed by a
viewers. Delacroix’s works at the Palais Bourbon and the Palais small group of journalists, were visible only as a special favor

CAT. 138 The Sultan of Morocco and His Entourage, 1856

108 DELACROIX
or by invitation, and were not reproduced and disseminated of the child figures, whether putti, winged spirits, or urchins,
as engravings. The regular frequency and public nature of to fill in the smallest vacant space. Critics were somewhat
the Salon therefore remained invaluable to Delacroix. That disconcerted by the joyful crush of bodies: “My primary
venue allowed him to give the public and the critics a sense criticism of M. Delacroix is that his figures are all crammed
of the renewal that his painting was undergoing elsewhere, together, and his planes are not sufficiently layered.”²⁰
in the context of architecture and the great tradition. Farther down, the overcrowding verges on the comical.
It is therefore fruitful to ask to what extent the challenges On the piers, deities of the rivers and seas of France are repre-
raised by his large works conditioned and shaped his easel sented as stone sculptures painted in trompe l’oeil grisaille
paintings (see fig. 37 and cat. 138). What role did Delacroix heightened with blue and gold. The bodies of the voluptuous
assign to these paintings? Were they primarily a sort of an Sequana (The Seine) and the solidly built Rhodamus (The
echo chamber, a medium in which to further elaborate the Rhone) seem to contort inside undersize niches. The illusory
mural experiments? Or could they also serve as a testing space carved out around the voluminous figures, which are
ground, a laboratory? Between 1833 and 1855, Delacroix rendered more in the round than in bas-relief, is inadequate
appears to have applied three successive and overlapping to contain them. They seem to burst open the frame and leap
artistic approaches in these works. out from the wall.
Playing mischievously with the architectural setting and
casually rivaling sculpture, Delacroix suffused the work with
The First Large Decorative Experiment: an abundance that created an impression of clutter—to the
The Grammar of Bodies point of disorder and overload. He developed a particularly
carnal grammar of bodies: the figures are monumental, heavy,
Delacroix’s first public commission for a large decorative and extensively modeled; their flesh is pink or bronze. When
work, the Salon du Roi in the Palais Bourbon (see fig. 38), not half-naked, most are draped in colored wool trimmed
was confirmed by decree on August 31, 1833, by Adolphe with silk accessories. They conjure an unspecified traditional
Thiers, then minister of trade and public works. The architec- Mediterranean society between ancient Rome and the
tural framework, a rigid Neoclassical setting— symmetrical, Morocco Delacroix had recently discovered. And they seem
highly compartmentalized, lit only indirectly—was unforgiv- to give off heat, to possess a vitality bursting with energy. The
ing. Within this space, Delacroix had to elaborate a fully atmosphere they create is a far cry from the chilly abstraction
allegorical program extolling national prosperity. The square so often associated with allegorical painting.
plan of the salon determined the selection and placement of While feigning difficulty in containing the lively crowd,
four female allegories, each presiding over one side of the the artist maintained close control over the figures’ symbolic
room, representing Agriculture and Industry, sources of role. He guaranteed their aesthetic unity and avoided any
French abundance, and Justice and War (Bellum), forces cumbersome realism, thus averting the inexorable obsoles-
inspiring respect for the monarchy both inside the country cence of modern dress and naive adherence to the ideology
and abroad. These four figures, represented in reclining poses of progress or any other social discourse. In contrast to their
in the narrow, horizontal ceiling compartments, identify the counterparts in Massacres at Chios (see fig. 5), painted ten
theme developed vertically in the friezes. There, a throng of years earlier, the figures here possess none of the individual
about sixty figures of men, women, children, and elderly traits of the professional models who posed for them. The
people nearly covers the turquoise ground. Having received faces are hardly distinguishable from one another or are
permission to remove the carved band beneath the cornice, simply obscured by shadow or an overlapping arm. All the
Delacroix had just barely sufficient room to establish a con- figures, whether young or old, bear the same trademark,
nection between the spandrels, defined by the arched shape recognizable in their bodily proportions and the standardiza-
of the bay windows. Making the most of the complex surface tion of their faces.²¹ They are not individuals but painted
thus obtained, he emphasized it as he pleased, filling each figures invented by the same hand and animated by the same
section to the maximum with piled-up, huddled bodies that creative principle. They are differentiated only by the roles
crawled and slid over the arches. Delacroix made abundant use they play in the present, not by personal histories or destinies

110 DELACROIX
that would have granted them the autonomy to escape the he has intuited them without copying them and that he
total control of their demiurge. belongs to the great family of true painters. . . . There
Such saturation of the space—tumultuous but never is something of Veronese in the fresco on which he
exorbitant—was certainly influenced by the festive spirit of painted Justice; there are memories of Roman art in the
Mannerist court art, masterfully represented in France by the fresco that represents Agriculture; there is something
painted and sculpted decorations of Rosso Fiorentino, then of of Michelangelo in the admirable figure of the black-
Niccolò dell’Abate, for the Château de Fontainebleau, decora- smith in the foreground of the frieze where the emblems
tive works considered the first expression of a French national of War are depicted. But overall, despite the allegorical
style. In the early 1830s, they were the object of an unprece- style, the ensemble has a character so modern, so new,
dented surge in interest led by the ornamentalist painter Claude that it is clear the artist has studied the admirable
Aimé Chenavard and befitting the taste of the time. Delacroix qualities of the great masters, but without becoming
is known to have visited the Château de Fontainebleau in early such a slave to any of them that he imitates their flaws.²⁵
January 1832; it was his first stop en route to Morocco.²² Other
references to the French Renaissance were on his mind when In addition to elaborating a grammar of bodies for the
he laid the groundwork for the decoration at the Salon du large decorative works, Delacroix was obliged to modify his
Roi. In the margins of a drawing study for the fictive niches on palette in order to create light in a place where the architec-
the pilasters, Delacroix noted, for the base, “see the pedestal ture afforded very little. Tasked with producing the illusion
for Germain Pilon’s graces,” a reference to the Monument to the that the walls had been breached and the space opened up to
Heart of Henri II (1561; Musée du Louvre).²³ radiant skies to ensure his work’s legibility, he had to reject
Without imitating the elongated bodies of the School of the easy solution of using dark grounds to highlight the fig-
Fontainebleau, Delacroix adopted the playful refinement and ures; he also had to convert contrasting values into contrasting
theatricality of its art, qualities that allow the figures to play colors. Delacroix brightened his palette, warmed his shadows,
their role in a painted narrative while creating the illusion of and chose sky-blue grounds to create an impression of lumi-
complicity with the viewer by means of an outward gaze. nosity and air. Those measures, first applied in the Salon du
Théophile Gautier rightly recognized this influence in the Roi, were fully mastered in the cupola of the Peers’ Library
Salon du Roi: nearly ten years later (see fig. 40). The critics hailed him:

Were it not for the gloomy style of the architecture, In the cupola of the Luxembourg, the victory won by
which dispels the illusion, you might believe, upon M. Delacroix over the miserliness of M. de Gisors [the
seeing these cheerful and luminous paintings, that you architect] can be considered a real tour de force. The
were in a Renaissance hall decorated by some artist painter was in some sense obliged to create the light
summoned from Florence—Primaticcio or Il Rosso. he needed to illuminate his figures. He had to seek in
The style is that elegant and supple, and these beautiful the tone of the draperies, the hue of the sky, the rays
allegorical women, nude or caressed by light draperies, that the architecture refused him. It was an arduous
have about them just such an air of royalty and familiar- struggle, but the painter emerged the victor in that
ity with magnificence.²⁴ fierce battle: he metamorphosed shadow into light.²⁶

Alexandre-Gabriel Decamps, though he missed the reference This paean from Gustave Planche was echoed by Gautier:
to Fontainebleau, sensed that Italian roots had been tapped: “By the magic of his palette, this painting illuminates itself;
the colors do not receive daylight, they provide it.”²⁷
It is indisputable that modern art has never given us The first painterly adjustments that Delacroix made
works better able to invoke the style and execution of when he undertook the large decorative paintings found their
beautiful Italian paintings. Remarkably, M. Delacroix way into several history paintings done during the course of
has never traveled to Italy; he has not seen the frescoes the Salon du Roi project or immediately after its completion.
of Venice or Florence or Rome. But it so happens that It is possible that they appeared as early as 1834, in the

DRIVEN TO GREATNESS: 1833–54 111

ornamental abundance and monumental placidity of Women of (cats. 91, 94). In a less exaggerated manner but following a
Algiers in Their Apartment (see cat. 83). His mural practice process identical to that used for the river and sea deities,
made its full migration to the studio two years later, with Saint Delacroix inscribed the larger-than-life figure of Medea in an
Sebastian (cat. 90), exhibited at the Salon of 1836. Although intentionally shallow setting, a cave where, abandoned by the
Delacroix very clearly borrowed the overall composition and unfaithful Jason, the queen would commit infanticide. The
the saint’s pose—head tilted to one side, collapsed torso, sculptural quality of that scheme was fundamental to the work,
and stiff, spread legs—from Rubens’s Lamentation (ca. 1612; already present at the earliest stage of its development. Several
Liechtenstein Museum, Vienna), he radically distinguished preliminary drawings indicate that Medea and Saint Sebastian
himself in the general tone, which is much less cold, gray, and were conceived at the same time (fig. 41). The charitable saint
macabre than the one chosen by the Flemish master. In fact, and murderous queen, unlikely pendants brought together on a
in the Saint Sebastian, sorrow is transcended by the solid single sheet, seem to have occurred to the painter primarily as
volumes, simplified forms, and radiating force of a warm and complementary figures; the drawing studies provide no infor-
slightly acid palette. Also taken from the Salon du Roi are the mation about the overall compositions or how the figures
turquoise blue ground, which sets off the rosy flesh tones and would be framed. Like trompe l’oeil statues in grisaille, the
red drapery, and the shallow, elliptical background, with its figures are modeled in a pen-and-ink wash on an undifferenti-
surprisingly flat trees and grassy embankment. The faces are ated ground.
schematic, generic, and obscured by shadows. Consequently, Planche, well informed about the decoration of the
the main narrative function rests with the bodies themselves, Salon du Roi by the time it was unveiled in October and
whose proportions relative to the frame are colossal, unprece- November 1837, linked the work to Medea About to Kill Her
dented in Delacroix’s history painting. The saint’s massive Children in his review of the Salon of 1838: “[Medea] is, to
body is worthy of Michelangelo’s Slaves. His powerful muscu- be sure, a painting of rare merit, perhaps the most beautiful
lature is accentuated by the raking light; his undersize head that M. Delacroix has ever produced, since in it you find
dissolves in the shadows, while his dramatically foreshortened all the qualities he has developed one after another in the
hands and feet project forcefully outward, toward the viewer. decoration for the Salon du Roi at the Chamber of Deputies.”³⁰
Gustave Planche aptly described the changes he saw: Théophile Gautier confirmed the soundness of Planche’s
“M. Eugène Delacroix’s Saint Sebastian will confound the assertion:
expectations of many. Those who have attentively followed
the projects the artist has undertaken and completed in the The Chamber of Deputies, which is not yet known to
last fourteen years will be astonished by this new transfor- the public . . . is worthy of the best stanze of Rome and
mation of an adventurous and innovative genius.”²⁸ Planche the most vaunted scuole of Venice. These allegorical,
explained that he had not yet been able to see the room mythological paintings, altogether unusual for M.
Delacroix had painted at the Chamber of Deputies, but Delacroix, are additional proof of the marvelous sup-
another, evidently better-informed critic, who wrote for pleness of his talent. Over the course of this major
L’artiste, promptly made the connection. He too began by project, these paintings will no doubt influence the
emphasizing the impression produced by Saint Sebastian, painter’s future. He has adopted a more expansive,
which was so unlike the clamor of Delacroix’s grandes machines grander manner; he has inserted sobriety in his color,
at the Salons of the 1820s. Then he added: “If, therefore, decorum in his style. He has made his spirit bow to all
you look with attention . . . you will notice in the figure of the architectural requirements, has confined himself
the saint, especially in the torso, a grand and simple style, an within bizarre compartments and unforgiving shapes.
expansive and vigorous execution. No doubt the decorative It is an excellent study and will affect the paintings he
projects executed by the artist at the Chamber of Deputies will do subsequently. . . . Medea About to Kill Her
contributed to the development of these qualities.”²⁹ Children is linked to the same order of ideas that pro-
Parallel to the last phase of decoration of the Salon du duced the frescoes in the throne room [the Salon du
Roi, which ended with the large trompe l’oeil grisailles on the Roi]. It is an ancient subject worked out with modern
piers, Delacroix worked on Medea About to Kill Her Children intelligence and in forms more human than ideal.³¹

DRIVEN TO GREATNESS: 1833–54 113

 modeled on John Hayter’s 1827 portrait of Pasta in the role
and costume of Medea.³³ Virginie Bernast has suggested, “if
Delacroix heard Madame Pasta in the role of Medea, the
memory of that performance was likely revived by Giulia
Grisi’s Norma at the Théâtre-Italien in Paris between 1835 and
1847. . . . Like Medea, the Druid priestess Norma is tempted
to commit infanticide after Pollione, a Roman proconsul,
abandons her for . . . Adalgisa.”³⁴
It is possible that this play of references was also at work
in Delacroix’s oeuvre: with Medea, he made an astonishing
return to the twin theme of Greece and tragedy—the two
were forever linked in his mind—by painting a peculiar kind
of pendant to Greece on the Ruins of Missolonghi (see cat. 26),
although this was certainly not his intention. That work fea-
tures an allegorical figure of modern Greece, successor to the
golden age of antiquity, weeping over her enslavement and the
murder of her children by the Ottoman Turks. A decade later
Delacroix proposed, with Medea, a mirror image—the repre-
sentation of a Greece prior to civilization. Savage, intuitive,
animalistic, Greece herself is the one who kills her offspring.
The formal self-reference is obvious: as in Missolonghi, the main
action is kept offstage; echoes of Liberty Leading the People are
evident in the protagonist’s face turned in profile, her bare
breasts, and the position of her legs.³⁵ In addition to the self-
reference, Delacroix alluded to the great masters of the past to
an unparalleled degree in Medea. The pyramidal composition is
FIG. 42 Andrea del Sarto (Andrea d’Agnolo) (Italian, 1486–1530). a reference—particularly jarring, even parodic in this context—
Charity, 1518–19. Oil on wood transferred to canvas, 7213⁄16 x 5315⁄16 in. of Andrea del Sarto’s Charity (fig. 42), while the sculptural
(185 x 137 cm). Musée du Louvre, Paris (712)
force of the queen is inspired by Michelangelo’s three-
dimensional works. Delécluze posited a connection between
Medea About to Kill Her Children was Delacroix’s first Correggio’s Venus and Cupid with a Satyr (formerly known as
large painting on a mythological theme and marked a decisive Sleep of Antiope) and the velvety softness of Medea’s skin. By
point of transition in his career. Yet the subject had preoccu- contrast, the rosy, glistening flesh tones of the children seem
pied him for a long time, as attested in a notebook entry from unquestionably Rubensian, while their whimpering expressions
the early 1820s and by the famous comment he wrote in his and wriggling postures seem to be borrowed directly from
Journal after returning from a performance of Gioachino Rembrandt’s The Rape of Ganymede (fig. 43). Far from eliciting a
Rossini’s Moses in E.pt at the Théâtre-Italien in March 1824: smile, these commonplace signs of terror render the horrifying
“I am preoccupied by Medea.”³² He had probably been truth of the situation, that of children who sense that they are
reminded of Simon Mayr’s opera Medea in Corinth, performed about to die at the hands of the person in whom they have
in Paris in 1823 with Giuditta Pasta in the title role. It is worth naturally put their complete trust.³⁶ Delacroix made ingenious
considering whether, fifteen years later, the memory of Pasta’s use of the narrative power of the lighting: as the shadow cast by
performance contributed to the artist’s own interpretation of the dagger onto the child’s thigh symbolically cuts into its flesh,
Medea, in oil. He rendered her in perfect left profile, her the mother’s blinding hatred is evoked by the penumbra that
upper face masked in shadow, crowned with a gold diadem swallows up her gaze. At the same time, her brightly lit breasts
set with precious stones and pearls. It appears that she was and hands accentuate her monstrous animality.

116 DELACROIX
 The painting was a total success with the critics, convert-
ing even the most traditional among them. They praised
Delacroix for applying his unique talent (that of using color to
express the intensity of life’s most savage aspects) to a tragic
subject enshrined in ancient and humanistic literature but
lacking an iconic counterpart in the art of Greco-Roman
sculptors and modern masters. In Medea, Delacroix summed
up the complexity of narrative and character in a compact,
autonomous group, borrowing from sculpture this means for
conveying content without providing context. He thereby
succeeded in inventing an iconography, the canonical force of
which was equal to that of the Laocoön.
Delacroix’s subsequent emulation of sculpture was less
pronounced and more fragmentary: he opted for half-length
representations (The Cumaean Sibyl, undertaken the same year
as Medea but exhibited at the Salon of 1845) and even tighter
framing. For example, the enigmatic head of Mary Magdalene
in the Wilderness (rejected by the Salon of 1845; see fig. 122)
seems to have been torn off a statue or a tomb effigy. His last
real success involving sculptural borrowings was Cleopatra and
the Peasant (cat. 95), exhibited at the Salon of 1839. The sub-
ject may have been inspired by act 5, scene 2, of Shakespeare’s
tragedy Antony and Cleopatra. The defeated queen, preferring
suicide to the humiliation of the Roman victory, stoically
ponders her own death, which takes the form of an asp that a
peasant has secretly delivered to her in a basket of figs. This
Shakespearean meditation on the vanity of power and the
world posits Cleopatra and the Peasant as the female pendant to
Hamlet and Horatio in the Graveyard (see cat. 96), also exhibited FIG. 43 Rembrandt (Rembrandt van Rijn) (Dutch, 1606–1669). The Rape of

at the Salon of 1839. Delacroix avoided the Baroque conven- Ganymede, 1635. Oil on canvas, 6911⁄16 x 5013⁄16 in. (177 x 129 cm). Staatliche
Kunstsammlungen, Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Dresden (inv. 1558)
tion of representing the queen in her death throes, preferring
to depict the moment just before she was bitten by the ser-
pent. References to ancient art are still present. Cleopatra Delacroix intensively in the early 1840s. He was obliged by
assumes the melancholic pose of the Roman goddess Pudicitia, the studious atmosphere to employ his formidable powers
while the peasant’s coarse features are borrowed from those of of invention in a more serious and serene register than he
sculpted satyrs or Greek comic masks. Delacroix revitalized had in the Salon du Roi. In addition to the two hemicycles,
these appropriations from the antique, giving the peasant’s one at each end of the library, there were five cupolas to
thick hands vibrant reddish highlights, darkening the figures’ decorate. Each cupola was dedicated to a specific theme—
hair, and accentuating the sparkle of the jewels and the sheen Law, Philosophy, Theology, Poetry, the Sciences—and each
of the fur. was supported by four hexagonal pendentives. The challenge
This type of composition—with its monumental, three- was threefold: to make erudite and little-known subjects
quarter-length figures standing out against a dark ground— comprehensible; to bring them to life even though they per-
can probably be related to the library project at the Palais tained less to actions than to ideas; and to counter the effect
Bourbon (see fig. 39). The latter, commissioned in the sum- of monotony that the large number of pendentives—twenty
mer of 1838 and completed at the end of 1847, occupied in all—would likely produce.

DRIVEN TO GREATNESS: 1833–54 117

 CAT. 114 Michelangelo in His Studio, 1849–50

Delacroix infused his designs with variety and at the Ovid among the Scythians, and Lycurgus Consults the Pythia (see
same time forged a formal typology by giving each subject fig. 44), the meditative pose of which repeats that of
type a distinct compositional schema. For example, great men Cleopatra in Cleopatra and the Peasant, cat. 95). Reclining
of virtue and sacrifice are represented as central, monumental figures shown one above another (Numa Pompilius and the
figures (Hippocrates Refusing the Gifts of the King of Persia, Nymph Egeria, Hesiod and the Muse, see fig. 45) and figures
Archimedes Killed by the Soldier, The Death of Seneca, Cicero partly superimposed (Adam and Eve Driven from Paradise,
Accusing Verres, Demosthenes Haranguing the Waves, The Death Socrates and His Demon, Michelangelo and His Genius) usually
of Saint John the Baptist). Figures positioned on steps running embody the inspiration that mysteriously unites the human
the length of one side symbolize a link between spiritual and the divine.³⁷ He would continue to explore the themes
and worldly power (Alexander and the Heroic Poems of Homer, embodied by such works, as he did in Michelangelo in His
Herodotus Consults the Magi, Aristotle Describes the Animals, Studio, an easel picture undertaken in 1849–50 (cat. 114).

DRIVEN TO GREATNESS: 1833–54 119

FIG. 46The Education of Achilles, study for a pendentive in the Deputies’ FIG. 47Spartan Girls Practicing Wrestling, study for a pendentive in
Library, Assemblée Nationale (Palais Bourbon), Paris, ca. 1838–47. the Deputies’ Library, Assemblée Nationale (Palais Bourbon), Paris,
Graphite on paper, 97⁄16 x 12 in. (24 x 30.5 cm). Musée du Louvre, ca. 1838–47. Graphite on tracing paper, 811⁄16 x 10½ in. (22 x 26.6 cm).
Paris (MI 1079) Musée du Louvre, Paris (RF 3713)

Isolated formal inventions of a more audacious sort painters of the seventeenth century. The contrast between
include a fantastic beast—the centaur Chiron—ridden by the the queen’s noble melancholy and the peasant’s rustic charm
young hero in The Education of Achilles (see fig. 46); the use of suggests a link to the art of Valentin de Boulogne. Last Words
empty space to evoke the sublime (The Chaldean Shepherds, of Marcus Aurelius (Musée des Beaux-Arts, Lyon), which
Inventors of Astronomy); and, to fill the composition, the cho- Delacroix exhibited five years later, at the Salon of 1844,
reographic division and dispersal of a figure group to the relied on the dark, austere style of Poussin’s Extreme Unction
three arms of a pendentive. Exemplifying this last approach is (1638–40; Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge), thus confirming
Spartan Girls Practicing Wrestling (fig. 47), which anticipated the turn Delacroix had taken.
by twenty years Edgar Degas’s treatment of the same rarely
encountered subject (National Gallery, London). The work
was never completed, perhaps because it was judged to be Second Experiment: Concentration
ill suited to a studious, exclusively male setting. The extraordi- and Unity of Emotion
nary formal inventiveness applied in all the pendentives
would later provide Delacroix with motifs that he would The succession of dark, spare, and intense religious scenes
develop as easel paintings or pastels. that Delacroix exhibited at the Salons in the late 1840s (Christ
Yet Cleopatra and the Peasant (cat. 95) shows that another on the Cross in 1847, see cat. 103; Christ at the Tomb in 1848, see
artistic influence was also at work in his studio practice, one cat. 106) stands in stark contrast to the luminous robustness of
that had nothing to do with the large decorative commissions Saint Sebastian Tended by the Holy Women from the Salon of 1836
in the Palais Bourbon. The vigorous chiaroscuro modeling (see cat. 90). Here again, a comparison with the large decora-
of the figures, rendered half-length on a brown ground, tive projects sheds light on the experimentation—stemming
reveals Delacroix’s new orientation toward the Caravaggesque from a different source—that led to these disparate results.

120 DELACROIX
Like the Moroccan subjects, religious painting was not a displayed at the Salon of 1835. That painting, however, was not
monolithic genre within Delacroix’s oeuvre but changed intended to be placed in a church; rather, the artist conceived
radically with the specific concerns of each commission. it as a reinterpretation of Rubens’s Christ on the Cross (The
After the unveiling of the Salon du Roi and the launch of Coup de Lance) (1620; Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Antwerp)
the Deputies’ Library project in 1838, the painter was entrusted, even before seeing the original in Antwerp in 1839. Delacroix
in 1840, with the decoration of the Chapel of the Virgin at diverted attention from the pathos of the Virgin, who is sup-
the church of Saint-Denys- du-Saint-Sacrement (see fig. 48). ported by Saint John on the left, to the muscular, suntanned
This was Delacroix’s second religious commission from the laborer carrying the ladder on the right. Mary Magdalene,
prefecture of the Seine, for which he had painted Christ in her garments and hair disheveled, prostrates herself at the foot
the Garden of Olives in 1824–26 (cat. 17). And it was the first of the cross on which Christ hangs lifelessly; behind her, a
involving a mural decoration, an opportunity Delacroix was crucified thief writhes in agony. As early as 1829, in an inti-
not about to miss. Since the success of the first decorative mate painting for his mistress, Eugénie Dalton, Delacroix had
paintings at the Palais Bourbon, he had been well aware that, explored the provocative, nearly licentious contrast between
when it came to secular decorations in civic buildings, he had the dying Christ and the anguished sinner (Museum of Fine
earned the trust of the public authorities. They were still wary, Arts, Houston).
however, about his paintings for churches. Delacroix knew At Saint-Denys- du-Saint-Sacrement, Delacroix was deter-
that, from the administration’s perspective, the project he was mined to be taken seriously as a religious painter (fig. 48).
taking on at Saint-Denys was merely a consolation prize. Inspired by the spatial configuration of the chapel and its
Fifteen years later, he recalled the situation when, at a private dedication to the Virgin, he initially composed an Annunciation
gathering, he had run into the comte de Rambuteau, former scene (fig. 49). Following famous examples by Raphael and
prefect of the Seine, who had been dismissed following the Ingres, he imagined transforming the chapel into a theatrical
revolution of 1848. Delacroix noted with some bitterness: space. Above the altar—the stage of the Christian drama—
he placed two angels pulling back a large red curtain to reveal
The old ruffian! All the time he was prefect he never the scene. It unfolds in a simple room, its back wall punctu-
said a word to me except to warn me not to ruin his ated by a half- open door that creates the illusion of extended
church of Saint-Denys- du-Saint-Sacrement. They had space. While the room and its main furnishing, a large,
originally offered [Joseph-Nicolas] Robert-Fleury the green- canopied bed seen in central perspective, recall the
commission for this thirteen-foot [sic] picture, at six Annunciations of the Flemish Primitives, the radiant glory of
thousand francs, but he did not feel inclined to accept the Virgin and the clouds carrying the archangel Gabriel echo
it and suggested that I should do it instead, of course Baroque painting. Delacroix ultimately abandoned his initial
with the consent of the directors. Varcollier [head of idea in favor of a Pietà exalting the Virgin’s suffering. He
the division of the Fine Arts at the prefecture], who at wavered about whether or not to keep the red draperies
the time knew neither myself nor my pictures as well as drawn open by angels (see cat. 100) before deciding on a
he does now, consented rather contemptuously to this more austere, rocky setting (see cat. 101), and he reversed the
exchange of artists; but I always understood that the composition to adapt it to the lighting in the chapel. After
prefect was more difficult, owing to his lack of confi- many delays involving the clergy, he was finally able to paint
dence in my meager talents.³⁸ the work on the chapel wall in the winter of 1843–44 with
the help of his assistant Gustave Lassalle-Bordes.
The prefectoral officials probably knew that the clergy had The Baroque effect of a theatrical performance was
little appreciated the religious paintings by Delacroix that replaced by the more archaic evocation of artificial caves
had been sent previously by the Ministère de l’Intérieur. The or low, arched niches containing sculptural representations of
prospect of entrusting a chapel dedicated to the Virgin to the Entombment. The principal reference for the overall
such a painter may have raised fears of a particularly inoppor- composition has been identified as a Pietà painted by Rosso
tune glorification of the flesh. The prefect might have recalled Fiorentino about 1530–40 for Anne, duc de Montmorency,
the tumultuous sensuality of the Christ on the Cross (cat. 85), the Constable of France (see fig. 50). Delacroix transcribed

DRIVEN TO GREATNESS: 1833–54 121

 CAT. 100 Pietà, first sketch, by 1843

the key features of this work: the rocky setting in tight focus; powers would successfully avert pastiche and guarantee the
the compact group of holy men (Nicodemus, Joseph originality and unity of his composition. His experienced use
of Arimathea, John the Evangelist) and women (Mary of color to model flesh—understood as the vehicle for the
Magdalene, Mary of Clopas) forming a square around the expression of extreme suffering—served to energize the dry
Virgin; Mary Magdalene fervently grasping Christ’s wounded lines of his model. Exploiting the viscous consistency of oil
feet, recalling their first encounter. The Italian master’s inge- mixed with wax, he gave material presence to the ravages of
nious inventiveness is faithfully rendered. The Virgin, head death and suffering, mimicking sweating skin, reddened eyes,
tilted and arms spread wide, assumes the pose of her son on bloody wounds, streaming tears, and decomposing flesh. The
the cross. Giving herself over to grief, she, too, appears expressionist qualities imparted by that medium combine,
to be dying; her gray and green flesh tones blend with those however, with the solid grouping of the figures. The figures’
of the corpse resting against her. The union of mother and cohesion is enhanced by their powerful contours and a con-
son in death is paired with a symbolic restaging of childbirth. centric distribution of color: in the center, the fusion of the
Delacroix adopted the fetal pose of Il Rosso’s Christ but ashen bodies of Christ and the Virgin; surrounding them, the
replaced the model’s Mannerist elegance with a stiffer posture. vivid reds of the mourners’ flesh and attire; and framing all,
Delacroix did not conceal his debt to Il Rosso’s Pietà, the setting, which echoes, in darker shades, the blue and
probably confident in the knowledge that his own expressive green harmonies of the central figures. It seems that Delacroix

124 DELACROIX
 Despite the darkness of the chapel and the artist’s dissat-
isfaction—Delacroix complained that he was denied the right
to add his finishing touches—the painting’s critical success
allowed him to believe he had risen to the challenge and that
other commissions for church decorations might follow. They
were not long in coming. By January 1847, Edmond Cavé,
director of the arts division at the Ministère de l’Intérieur, had
led him to hope that he would be entrusted with the decora-
tion for the transepts of Saint-Sulpice.³⁹ Delacroix thus had
the opportunity to develop rapidly the expressive means he
had employed in the Pietà. Only two years after completing
that commission, he used the same principles in an even
simpler, vertical composition: his most contemplative version
of Christ on the Cross (cats. 102, 103). He modeled the work,
an easel painting, on Pierre Paul Prud’hon’s Christ on the Cross
(1822; Musée du Louvre).⁴⁰ Initially commissioned for the
cathedral of Strasbourg, Prud’hon’s painting went instead to
the Musée du Luxembourg—a particularly enviable fate in the
eyes of Delacroix, who published a laudatory article on the
elder painter during the same period.⁴¹ In Delacroix’s 1846
Crucifixion scene, the pallid body of Christ, whose face is
obscured, rises up amid bluish shadows. When viewed from
afar, it constitutes the primary source of light in the painting,
as austere and solid in appearance as its neo- Caravaggesque
model. Closer examination reveals blood streaming supernatu-
CAT. 102 Christ on the Cross, sketch, 1845
rally from the figure’s hands to its feet, even to the point of
causing revulsion. Viscous and brilliant, the fluid is fashioned
with multicolored strokes using the technique of flochetage
was working on this scheme in the sketch now in the Louvre over the entire length of the body. The flood of vermilion
(cat. 101). The work began as a powerful line drawing in ink, is augmented symbolically by the crimson banner of the
over which the artist applied paint in colored masses, some Roman knight in the background and the coagulated coats
thickly impastoed and laid down with a knife, others more of paint in the sunset on the horizon. Above Christ’s head, the
fluid, applied with a brush. The chiaroscuro is exaggerated traditional sign bearing the charges against him is implausibly
and the colors bold, but the structure holds together. outsized, heavy, and limp, metamorphosed into the serpent
The painter has caught the beholder’s gaze in a trap. of evil.
Once drawn in by the Pietà’s concentric force, the viewer’s Christ on the Cross was followed directly by Christ at the
gaze circles continuously within the virtuoso composition, Tomb (cat. 106), the beginnings of which were recorded in
picking up subtle echoes in the protagonists’ faces, hands, and Delacroix’s Journal in January 1847, under the title “Christ
arms. Worshippers, caught up in the work’s anguish, would laid out on a stone, mourned by the holy women.”⁴²
be motivated to repeat their prayers. The Pietà thus marks Delacroix, now more self-assured, departed from the closed
Delacroix’s return to the intense pathos of Massacres at Chios, schema of the Pietà of Saint-Denys- du-Saint-Sacrement
but with one essential difference: the scattered, centrifugal (see fig. 48). Probably guided by the structure of an
composition of the painting of 1824 was succeeded twenty Entombment by Rubens of which he owned a painted copy—
years later by the extreme concentration and dramatic unity of the original was then (as now) in Cambrai—he loosened the
the religious mural. composition and let it breathe by dividing the figure group

126 DELACROIX
into subgroups.⁴³ The Lamentation scene occupies the lower drawing vanish as you add details to it, a great deal more
part of the frame; in the background, the desolate landscape of that impression remains than you will manage to put
of Mount Golgotha is punctuated with three crosses. The into it if you proceed in the opposite fashion.⁴⁵
light, used with great economy, seems to emanate solely from
the livid body and white shroud of Christ, laid out on the Delacroix deliberately sought to reverse the creative process
tomb. The other protagonists and the landscape are painted in he had followed in his youth, notably, the one he had used
varied but very muted tones; Saint John’s bare chest, shaded for Massacres at Chios, which he was probably reminded of as
by his bent head, is as dark as the other figures’ clothing. he reread his Journal of 1824. This meant not rushing to the
The color notes in the artist’s Journal indicate that earth tones canvas and beginning with the particulars of each figure, a
(umber, green earth, burnt green earth) played a decisive method that would necessitate creating unity after the fact,
role.⁴⁴ Christ’s stiff corpse, its skeletal structure showing with highlights and glazes. On the contrary, the entire elabo-
through under the pallid skin, is modeled in two tones ration of the painting had to be grounded in the preparatory
(bluish-white and gray-green), which blend under the effect study’s “tone and the effect”—its large, colored shapes, light,
of chiaroscuro. Gore is represented discreetly. Abandoning and shadows—with as little deviation as possible, because
Rubens and his sensual eloquence, Delacroix here seems that method guaranteed unity. He returned to this subject in
deliberately to have followed in the footsteps of Jusepe de detail the very next day.
Ribera and Rembrandt, taking asceticism to a level unequaled
in the rest of his oeuvre. He was inspired, perhaps, by the One of the great advantages of [doing] a lay-in by tone
masterpieces in the Galerie Espagnole that Louis-Philippe and general effect, without worrying about the details,
established at the Louvre in 1838. is that you need to put in only those that are absolutely
Delacroix derived lasting satisfaction from the high necessary. Beginning by completing the backgrounds,
degree of dramatic and formal unity he achieved in Christ at as I have done here, I have made them as simple as
the Tomb. The work even seems to have played a key role in possible so as to avoid their appearing overloaded
his artistic experimentation. It is probably no coincidence that beside the simple masses that still represent the figures.
in January 1847, just as he was starting the painting, he began Conversely, when I come to finish the figures, the sim-
once more to keep a journal. For the first time since Massacres plicity of the backgrounds will allow—even compel—
at Chios (painted between January and August 1824), Delacroix me to put in only what is absolutely essential. Once the
reported daily on the development of a painting he intended sketch has been brought to this stage, the right thing to
to show at the Salon. From the start, he used the Journal to do is to carry each part as far as possible, and to refrain
reflect on his working process. He no longer seemed preoc- from working over the picture as a whole, assuming, of
cupied with finding subject matter or inspiration; rather, he course, that the effect and tone have been determined
was concerned about mastering its execution. Determined this throughout. What I mean is, that when you decide to
time to preserve the integrity of the whole as he originally finish a particular figure among others as yet only laid
conceived it, he invested a considerable amount of time in the in, you must be careful to keep the details simple, to
ébauche, or preliminary laying-in of the composition: avoid being too much out of harmony with figures that
are still in the stage of a sketch.⁴⁶
After lunch, I resumed work on the Christ at the Tomb:
it is the third session on the ébauche; . . . I got it going Delacroix thus formulated a system to prevent himself
again in a lively manner and prepared it for a fourth from working on all parts of a painting simultaneously. He
pass. I am satisfied with this ébauche; but how to set a level of completion not to be surpassed in one part of
preserve the overall impression that results from very the composition (the background, in the present case), then
simple masses while adding details? Most painters—and applied that limit to the rest. When work proceeds on all
I did this too in the past—begin with the details and elements at the same time and on the same level, “the eye
create the effect at the end.—Whatever regret you feel becomes accustomed to details, when they are introduced
when you see the impression of simplicity in a beautiful gradually into one figure after another, and in all at the same

DRIVEN TO GREATNESS: 1833–54 129

sitting, and the painting never seems finished. First disadvan-
tage of the method: the details smother the masses. Second
disadvantage: the work takes much longer to do.”⁴⁷ Delacroix
invoked these precepts until the end of his life, though he
was not always able to adhere to them. For example, in 1860
he wrote: “There are two things that must be learned: the first
is that one must correct a lot; the second is that one must not
correct too much.”⁴⁸
Christ at the Tomb was sold to comte Théodore de Geloës
d’Elsloo even before it was shown at the Salon of 1848.
Delacroix was pleased when he saw it again, as he reported in
his Journal on February 16, 1850, after a visit to the collector’s
home in Paris.⁴⁹ He borrowed the painting for his retrospec-
tive at the Exposition Universelle of 1855 and, with the memory
of the work still fresh in his mind, noted in December of that
year his delight in the unity of the scene. “It inspires an emo-
tion that astonishes even me. You can’t pull yourself away, and
not a single detail calls out to be admired or distract attention.
It’s the perfection of this art [painting], whose aim is to produce
a simultaneous effect. If painting produced its effects in the
manner of literature, which is but a series of successive scenes,
there would be some justification for the detail to stand out.”⁵⁰
It is likely that the success of Christ at the Tomb encour-
aged Delacroix to develop his new approach to form by apply-
ing it to other subjects, including some taken from secular
literary sources. The Death of Valentin (fig. 51), after Goethe’s
Faust, painted the same year and also exhibited at the Salon of
The Death of Valentin, 1847. Oil on canvas, 32¼ x 259⁄16 in. (82 x 65 cm).
FIG. 51
1848, would demonstrate this talent to the public. The scene
Kunsthalle Bremen—Der Kunstverein in Bremen (inv. 552-1948/12) (J 288)
depicts the aftermath of Valentin’s fateful duel with Faust and
Mephistopheles (depicted in plate 11 of the 1828 suite of
lithographs; see cat. 50), as the collective lamentation for the holy women and disciples.”⁵¹ Saint Stephen Borne Away by His
murdered victim begins. But the pale, stiff silhouette that Disciples was finally completed for the Salon of 1853 (cat. 130).
attracts the light in the center of the painting is not Valentin: it The format and the main lines of the composition are similar
is Marguerite, his errant sister, consumed with remorse and to those of Christ at the Tomb, but the dark rocks have been
condemned by the curses of her dying brother, who takes on replaced by the ramparts of Jerusalem, and Stephen’s body
the role of martyr. The dark cliffs of Christ at the Tomb are faces right rather than left, like Christ’s. The kneeling figure
replaced by city buildings unified by their uniformly treated in the foreground is no longer a tearful Saint John meditating
brown facades even as, sunlit in the distance, three pinnacles on the crown of thorns but a holy woman wiping the blood
of the church replace the three crosses of Golgotha. from the steps where the stones that killed Stephen still lie.
Such adaptations of a literary subject remained rare during The intense physicality of the two female figures in the fore-
this period. More often, he chose to represent Christian ground (both have vigorous bare arms, and one, an exposed
martyrs, a theme that he would take in a far more harrowing bust) tempers the austerity of the scene. The entanglement of
direction than he had in the Saint Sebastian at Nantua (see bodies is more complex and disjointed than in Christ at the
cat. 90), as the artist noted in his Journal on December 14, Tomb, but the restricted palette, underscored by stark chiar-
1847, “Saint Stephen, after being stoned, gathered up by the oscuro effects, is even more severe than in the earlier work.

130 DELACROIX
 CAT. 125 The Agony in the Garden, 1851

In an atmosphere of red, earth-tone, and gray harmonies, the with brilliant touches of white to represent the lines of
only precious luminous notes lie in the white dawn and the mortar between the stones. Tempera lends itself admi-
green chasuble fringed with gold falling from the saint’s upper rably to such simple effects because the colors do not
body. The naive, almost Symbolist character of the architec- blend together as they do in oil painting. Several
tural setting echoes many other paintings by Delacroix: the sky towers or castellated battlements stand out against the
with its long, glowing horizontal streaks is a distant revival of very simply painted sky, and are detached from one
the skies in the much earlier Massacres at Chios (see fig. 5) and another solely through the intensity of the tone.⁵³
Hamlet and Horatio in the Graveyard (see cat. 86). The impene-
trable opacity of the walls, composed of a series of cubes, is Delacroix was emboldened by the new mastery of emotion
cast into relief by the rain of fire. Their shape derives from that he achieved by using a dark palette. He was no longer
Delacroix’s memory of the ramparts at Meknes, but their almost afraid to take on subjects that he would have judged
biblical simplicity is probably indebted also to theatrical sets, unrewarding for their lack of moral ambiguity signified, in
which the artist admired for their effectiveness: part, by the visually exuberant details that were a prominent
feature of his early paintings. He no longer hesitated to paint
Saw I Puritani [by Vincenzo Bellini, at the Théâtre- the absolute solitude of Christ in extremis. Therefore, in
Italien]. . . . The moonlight scene at the end is superb, the early 1850s, he returned to the subject of Christ on the
like everything that the designer in this theater does.⁵² Mount of Olives, which he had first painted in 1824–26
I think he obtains his effects with very simple colours, for the church of Saint-Paul-Saint-Louis (cat. 17). In contrast
using black and blue and perhaps umber, but they are to that early composition, in which Jesus fends off the coming
well understood as regards the planes and the way in torture with a theatrical gesture, the later one shows him
which one tint is placed above another. A very simple reduced by anguish to crawling on the ground, like a beast at
tone was used for the terrace at the top of the ramparts, bay (cat. 125). Any human companionship (sleeping apostles

DRIVEN TO GREATNESS: 1833–54 133

 CAT. 112 Christ at the Column, probably 1849

or approaching soldiers), any visible supernatural presence requires an incredible degree of sublimity for this ridiculous
(angels), is denied him. figure not to ruin the whole picture. . . . The blood-streaked
Delacroix’s new interest in Christ’s solitary suffering back, the head, so wonderfully expressive of the fever of suffer-
may explain why the artist never painted the scene of his arrest, ing, the one arm that can be seen, are all indescribably beauti-
however dramatic its potential. It was the scene of Christ’s ful.”⁵⁴ In keeping with these observations, Delacroix excluded
flagellation that held his attention at the dawn of the 1850s. That any presence that would have competed with that of the martyr
motif would have struck a chord for any admirer of Rubens. (cat. 112). He isolated Christ’s figure in a bare stone setting
Delacroix had been dazzled by the Flemish painter’s Flagellation and eliminated the realistic effects of whip marks and bloody
on his first visit to the church of Saint Paul in Antwerp in 1839 wounds, which he symbolically transferred to the red draping
and again eleven years later, when he wrote: “The Flagellation of at Christ’s feet. The subject is reduced to a single motif: Jesus’
Christ . . . a masterpiece of genius if ever there was one. It is throbbing, dripping back, rendered in a virtuoso weave of pink,
slightly marred by the big executioner on the left. It really green, white, and brown brushstrokes. In the second version

134 DELACROIX
 CAT. 124 Pietà, ca. 1850

(Musée des Beaux-Arts, Dijon), dated 1852, the silhouettes of a of sinuous bodies in three- quarter profile, can probably be
few soldiers appear under the vault in the lower left corner, but traced to the central panel of Rubens’s Christ on the Straw
the light is reduced even more. The draping loses its brilliance, (1618; Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Antwerp), a Lamentation
the column is darker, Christ’s legs and face vanish in the shad- Delacroix saw in the Cathedral of Our Lady in Antwerp
ows, and the rendering of his hair is no longer vibrant and during his visit there in 1850. The scene is considerably sim-
refined. Light emanates solely from his tortured back and bound plified in comparison to its counterpart at Saint-Denys- du-
hands, their gleam accentuated by the contrast with the filth of Saint-Sacrement (see fig. 48). It features the mouth of a cave,
the shirt and the notice plastered on the wall to the right. The two figures, and a harmonious balance of three bright colors
picture’s dramatic and formal intensity is radically distilled. (blue, white, and red) amid cool tones (gray, green, and
During this same period, Delacroix executed his most brown). The outstretched arms of the Virgin no longer recall
concentrated version of the Pietà (cat. 124). The vertical, those of Christ on the cross but extend toward her son as she
tightly framed composition, featuring a compact arrangement leans to her left, her body’s curve echoed by the cave’s rocky

DRIVEN TO GREATNESS: 1833–54 135

 CAT. 140 Lamentation over the Body of Christ, 1857

profile. While her face is relatively inexpressive, her posture, more luminous and brightly colored, probably at the request
nearly identical to that of the dead Christ, conveys her mater- of the dealer Jean-Hector Bouruet-Aubertot in 1857 (cat. 140).
nal suffering. She seems to want to protect her son from the The same is true for the subject of Christ on the Cross, to
world’s hatred. In so doing, she shields him from the light; which Delacroix returned in 1853 at the instigation of another
it touches only the white shroud, leaving his ashen face and dealer, Adolphe Beugniet (fig. 52).⁵⁵ For this reprise, he
torso sheltered in his mother’s midnight-blue embrace. reversed the composition of Christ on the Cross exhibited at the
That Pietà, Delacroix’s simplest and most compact Salon of 1847 (see cat. 103) and replaced the dark atmosphere
expression of the theme—a lithograph by Célestin Nanteuil of that earlier work with the murky light of an overcast sky.
after the painting would later captivate Vincent van Gogh—by The vaporous clouds have a lightness and clarity rivaling that
no means exhausted the subject or achieved perfection in the produced by pastel, a medium he was using during this period
painter’s eyes (Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam). He returned for other versions of the same subject, but on paper.⁵⁶ Delacroix
subsequently to the composition recorded in a sketch (see also made deliberate reference to earlier works. For example,
cat. 101) for the mural at Saint-Denys- du-Saint-Sacrement. in the 1847 picture Mary Magdalene recalls her role in the
He produced a new version with variations, less dramatic but treatment of the theme exhibited at the Salon of 1835 (see

136 DELACROIX
 Third Experiment: Explosion and
Whirlwind of Colors

At the turn of the 1850s, Delacroix achieved an astonishing,

almost contradictory diversity in his painting. He had just
distinguished himself at the Salon of 1848 with the extraordi-
nary gravity of Christ at the Tomb (see cat. 106) and the dramatic
tension of The Death of Valentin (see fig. 51) when, the next year,
his submissions to the following Salon cast him in a completely
new light. They included two large outdoor views of flowers
and fruit and two sumptuous interiors, one lighthearted (Women
of Algiers, fig. 32), the other tragic (Othello and Desdemona; see
fig. 116). The luxury and sensuality in these paintings are
striking when considered in the context of the workers’ upris-
ing of June 1848, the first French presidential campaign, the
competition for the allegory of the Republic, and the honors
and medals awarded for the first time to exponents of unvar-
nished rural realism—Théodore Rousseau, Rosa Bonheur,
and Gustave Courbet. Delacroix’s gesture was interpreted as a
sign of retreat from the modern world, in line with the reac-
tionary skepticism he was unafraid to display in his correspon-
dence during the same period.⁵⁷ It is certain that the artist was
deeply disturbed by the outbursts of violence that followed the
events of February and June 1848. The sacking of the Palais
Royal, which brought about the destruction of his Cardinal
Richelieu Saying Mass, must have come as a hard blow.⁵⁸ But
Christ on the Cross, 1853. Oil on canvas, 2815⁄16 x 23½ in. (73.5 x
FIG. 52
the Bonapartist sympathies of his lover Joséphine de Forget, a
59.7 cm). The National Gallery, London (inv. NG6433) (J 460)
close friend of Charles-Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, were
rewarded when the latter was elected as the first president
of France in December 1848. Beginning in January 1849,
cat. 85); the same might be said for the figures supporting the Delacroix was invited to soirées at the Palais de l’Elysée and to
swooning Virgin in the later painting, who recall the Virgin sit in the presidential loge at the Opéra.
supporting Saint John in the earlier one. Certainly the pros- It is risky to take the political reading of the large floral
trate apostle with bronze flesh tones clothed in green drapery still lifes any further. However, there is good reason to con-
in the later work echoes his counterpart at the lower left of sider them in the context of the artist’s new commissions for
Christ on the Mount of Olives exhibited at the Salon of 1827–28 large decorative projects. In 1846 and 1847, Delacroix had
(see cat. 17). completed the mural paintings commissioned for the Palais
What emerges is that the most compelling phase of Bourbon and the Palais du Luxembourg. As the reign of Louis-
Delacroix’s religious painting occurred between 1847 and 1852, Philippe was collapsing, he thus found himself without a
when it reached its expressive height. During these years, public project for the first time since 1833. Commissions were
through the concentration of his compositions and the auster- not long in arriving, however, owing to the good relations he
ity of his palette, the painter demonstrated absolute mastery of enjoyed with the new government, headed by the Prince-
his pictorial powers. And yet, during exactly the same period, President Louis Napoleon Bonaparte. He learned in April
he was exploring a path leading in the opposite direction, 1849, through his friend the curator Frédéric Villot, that his
toward dynamism and rich decoration. name had been put forward by the architect Félix Duban

DRIVEN TO GREATNESS: 1833–54 137

 Apollo Slays the Python, 1849–51. Oil on canvas, ceiling of the Gallery of Apollo, Musée du Louvre, 26 ft. 215⁄16 in. x 24 ft. 7¼ in. (8 x 7.5 m).
FIG. 53
Musée du Louvre, Paris (3818) (J 578)

for the project to complete the ceiling of the Gallery of setting. He came into direct dialogue with the most illustrious
Apollo.⁵⁹ The following month, the Ministère de l’Intérieur masters of the French grand goût: the ornamentalist Gilles Marie
commissioned him to decorate a chapel in the church of Oppenord, who had produced the plans for Saint-Sulpice
Saint-Sulpice, a much larger and more prestigious religious at the behest of the regent Philippe d’Orléans; the architect
site than Saint-Denys- du-Saint-Sacrement. The commission for Louis le Vau; and the painter Charles Le Brun, who in the
the ceiling of the Gallery of Apollo was an extraordinary 1660s had done decorative work for Louis XIV in which he
honor; it gave Delacroix the opportunity to occupy a central, elaborated the prototype for the Royal Apartments at the
permanent position in the most prominent area of the fore- Château de Versailles. Delacroix’s new commissions were also
most museum in the world (fig. 53). These two projects part of a historicist movement that, following the burst of
would allow him to work for the first time in far more historic enthusiasm for Gothic art and the French Renaissance in the
spaces. His previous commissions in the capital were associated 1830s, gave new life to the styles of Louis XIV and Louis XV.
with the completion of new spaces, both in a simplified and That aesthetic, inspired by the restoration of the Château de
streamlined Neoclassicist style by the two architects Alphonse Versailles and its opening as a museum, was taken up and
de Gisors and Etienne Hippolyte Godde. But at Saint-Sulpice adapted from the early 1840s by the architects and interior
as at the Louvre, Delacroix found himself in a princely Baroque designers Jules de Joly and Eugène Lami; it was also favored

138 DELACROIX
 CAT. 111 Basket of Flowers, ca. 1848–50

by the great patrons of the arts who emerged at that time: floral compositions from most other flower paintings of the
James de Rothschild and the king’s two eldest sons, Ferdinand day, heirs to the spirit of botanical science and its adherence
Philippe, the crown prince, and Louis, duc de Nemours. to the illusionistic, limpid, and meticulous graphic description
Delacroix began the large floral compositions in autumn of each element. The deaths of Pierre Joseph Redouté, in
1848, basing them on studies of flowers and fruit he had done 1840, and Louis Antoine Berjon, in 1843, left only Antoine
the previous summer.⁶⁰ He resumed working on five of them Chazal and a few other specialized flower painters to perpetu-
in mid-February 1849, with the intention of exhibiting them at ate the Flemish tradition in Paris. Under attack by weary
the Salon, which opened on May 15. The paintings were, young critics scornful of the “vulgar, nit-picking florists”
then, contemporaneous with the inception of the two most condemned to produce mere “dining room pictures,” the
prestigious decorative commissions of his career as well as practice was fading.⁶²
with the French revival of seventeenth- century court art. Only the best-informed critics, such as Théophile
When the critics discovered them at the Salon, where two Gautier, would identify the tradition that Delacroix had
of the five were shown, they recognized immediately “the embraced, one that had been initiated by the seventeenth-
gravity of the style, the breadth of execution . . . the skillful century painter Jean-Baptiste Monnoyer.⁶³ After training in
arrangement.”⁶¹ These qualities distinguished Delacroix’s Antwerp, Monnoyer had introduced to France and then to

DRIVEN TO GREATNESS: 1833–54 139

 FIG. 54A Vase of Flowers, 1833. Oil on canvas, 22¾ x 193⁄16 in. (57.7 x 48.8 cm). National Galleries of
Scotland, Edinburgh (inv. NG 2405) (J 492)

England the art of the ceremonial still life pioneered by Jan composition marks a growing maturity in its departure from
Davidsz. de Heem. He gave the form unprecedented ampli- the spontaneity of Delacroix’s early bouquets of 1833–34
tude, adapting it to the decoration of the châteaux of Vaux-le- (fig. 54), painted at Frédéric Villot’s home, in Champrosay, and
Vicomte and Versailles and to the design needs of the royal at George Sand’s, in Nohant. Those earlier works, the vivacity
tapestry manufactories of Gobelins and Beauvais. Delacroix’s of which betrays what must have been the messy reality of
painting of a rustic bouquet of syringa blossoms, wild rose, study sessions plagued by drooping stems, fallen leaves, wilted
anemones, wallflowers, and white hydrangea (cat. 111), possi- petals, and fruit rotting around the rustic stoneware pot, were
bly done in the summer of 1848, presents characteristics elaborated in a far more fluid medium, perhaps in emulation
typical of Monnoyer.⁶⁴ Bursting forth from a modest wicker of similar floral compositions by Paul Huet.
basket set on a front-facing table, the remarkably light, well- The large floral compositions that Delacroix elaborated
balanced arrangement is modeled in depth, with the result over many months for the Salon of 1849 were the products of
that certain flowers are lost in shadow. The artful, precise high ambition. Perhaps the artist had seen, displayed in the

140 DELACROIX
 FIG. 55 Jean-Baptiste Belin, called Blin
(or Blain) de Fontenay (French, 1653–
1715). Flowers in a Gold Vase, a Bust of
Louis XIV, a Cornucopia, and Armor, 1687.
Oil on canvas, 7413⁄16 x 63¾ in. (190 x
162 cm). Musée du Louvre, Paris (4464)

FIG. 56 A Vase of Flowers on a Console,

1848–49. Oil on canvas, 531⁄8 x 403⁄16 in.
(135 x 102 cm). Musée Ingres,
Montauban (inv. MNR 162) (J 503)

Louvre, the reception piece that Monnoyer’s successor and In the end, A Vase of Flowers on a Console was not exhib-
son-in-law, Jean-Baptiste Belin de Fontenay, had exhibited at ited at the Salon of 1849; it was shown for the first time in
the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture in 1687 1855. Delacroix had originally wanted this aristocratic, city
(fig. 55). Belin’s painting attests to the nobility and splendor dweller’s bouquet to be exhibited together with outdoor
acquired by the floral still life under Louis XIV: unprece- flower paintings. As he explained to his friend Constant
dented in dramatic intensity, skillfully linked to sculpture and Dutilleux, “I wanted to get away from the kind of template
architecture, the still life acceded to the ranks of court art that seems to make all flower painters repeat the same vase
and large-scale decoration. Delacroix’s A Vase of Flowers on a with the same columns, or the same fantastic hangings that
Console partakes in that tradition (fig. 56). The painting serve as background or foil. I have tried to render bits of
depicts the reception area of a palace or large Paris mansion nature as they appear in gardens merely by assembling the
decorated with gilded white woodwork, large mirror, heavy greatest possible variety of flowers inside the same frame and
sheared-velvet curtain, and marble-topped gilt-wood console in a more or less probable manner.”⁶⁵ However, owing to the
in the style of Louis XIV. Centered in the foreground, a por- setting Delacroix chose—a grand, English-style park bordered
celain vase with gilded bronze mount sends forth an explosion by tall trees—these floral compositions are both luxurious and
of flowers—a dense arrangement of roses, peonies, gerani- implausible. Basket of Flowers (cat. 109) is luminous, evoking
ums, marguerite daisies, gladioli, wallflowers, cinerarias, and summer through the intense blue of the sky. The composition
poppies—that almost reaches the upper edge of the frame. centers on a precious piece of basketwork artfully overturned
The bouquet’s full size is not immediately apparent, as its to release a flood of flowers (asters, geraniums, dahlias, wall-
shaded, outer portions are camouflaged by the surroundings, flowers, peonies) in warm colors. Above them, a strange
swallowed up by the curtain’s vegetal motif and the blurry arch of morning glories, in preparation for which Delacroix
reflection in the mirror. Evidently placed between two win- produced a splendid pastel study (cat. 108) its leaves dispro-
dows, the bouquet is modeled by these two sources of light: portionately large in relation to the basket, rises from the left
colorful, brightly illuminated flowers mass together in the and unspools in the form of a gallows.
lower portion, while the other half of the arrangement is greatly Basket of Flowers and Fruit (cat. 110), darker and in sharper
muted, seen in contre-jour against the incoming daylight. contrast, takes autumnal opulence as its subject: against a late

DRIVEN TO GREATNESS: 1833–54 141

 CAT. 110 Basket of Flowers and Fruit, 1849

afternoon sky, the basket seems to collapse under the weight transcendent power, perceptible in the unreal light that bathes
of an impossible heap of fruits and vegetables: peaches, pears, the scene. The atmosphere in these two outdoor still lifes is
melon, eggplants, grapevines, oxheart tomatoes, gooseberry steeped in the marvelous and the fantastic; the plant kingdom
and plum tree branches. As in A Vase of Flowers on a Console, asserts itself with such force that it seems to possess an autono-
Delacroix here used great skill in creating effects of contrast. mous power capable of making one forget that the composi-
The muted colors of the hollyhock bushes that frame the basket tions’ highly artificial arrangements are human inventions.
bring out the brilliance of the fruits in the foreground. The The three large floral compositions were exhibited
soft light emphasizes their smooth or rough textures, and a together at the Exposition Universelle of 1855 and remained in
bright, hazy outline, traced with the brush, gives them a pecu- Delacroix’s studio at his death. In all three, the painter seems
liar radiance. No debris or trace of decay sullies the stone table to have been moved by the desire to saturate the surface,
or the contents of the basket, which is protected by a vegetal sometimes at the cost of an unlikely invasion. He also sought
honor guard. The viewer experiences an almost religious feel- to produce an overall dynamic by carefully attending to the
ing before what looks like an offering on an altar dedicated to a succession of forms and the contrasts of light. The whirlwind

DRIVEN TO GREATNESS: 1833–54 143

 motion that resulted is particularly vigorous in Basket of Flowers
(cat. 109), but it is already present in certain studies, such as the
large watercolor heightened with gouache and pastel formerly
in the Choquet collection (fig. 57). In those works, Delacroix
often chose not to represent the flowers’ stems, but only the
heads, rising up from all sides and defying gravity.
These characteristics are particularly interesting when
linked to the challenges Delacroix faced the following year in
the Gallery of Apollo. There, on the ceiling, he was tasked
with depicting the battle between the Olympian gods and
earthly forces; visible and comprehensible from all sides, the
scene was to create the illusion that the gallery was open to
the sky. These constraints meant that the composition had to
be circular and would have to fill the entire surface allotted to
it. He developed the composition in a series of drawings and
oil sketches (cat. 122).⁶⁶ The final sketch, elaborated between
April and June 1850 and presented as a modello for the
approval of the architect Félix Duban, shows how Delacroix
FIG. 57 Bouquet of Flowers, ca. 1848. Watercolor, gouache, and pastel
arrived at his formal solution.⁶⁷ Beginning with the original
highlights over graphite on two sheets of gray paper, joined vertically,
subject (Apollo slays the Python), placed in the center, he
259⁄16 x 25¾ in. (65 x 65.4 cm). Musée du Louvre, Paris (RF 31719)
summoned a considerable number of secondary figures and
established connections among them (cat. 123). The program
was explained in a booklet that accompanied the invitation to
the unveiling in October 1851:

The god, mounted on his chariot, has already launched

a portion of his arrows; his sister, Diana, flying behind
him, presents him with her quiver. . . . The waters of
the flood begin to subside and deposit the corpses of
men and animals on the mountaintops, or carry them
away. . . . The gods are outraged upon seeing the land
abandoned to misshapen monsters. . . . Minerva and
Mercury dash off to exterminate them, expecting
eternal wisdom to repopulate the lonely universe.
Hercules crushes them with his club; Vulcan, the god
of fire, drives off Night and the impure vapors; and
Boreas and the Zephyrs dry up the waters with their
breath and disperse the clouds.⁶⁸

To complete the circle, Delacroix added Victory holding

a palm leaf; Iris, messenger of the gods; and finally, “more
timid deities [who] contemplate this battle of the gods and
the elements from a distance”—namely, Juno and Venus with
her procession of cupids. The painter ordered the figures by
CAT. 122 Apollo Slays the Python, sketch, ca. 1850 size. Paradoxically, the most important, Apollo, is also the

144 DELACROIX
 CAT. 123 Apollo Victorious over the Serpent Python, sketch, ca. 1850

smallest, because supposedly the farthest from the beholder, but decorations Charles Le Brun had completed in the gallery
his presence is augmented by the visual power of the golden before the project was suspended in 1679. From Le Brun’s
halo that surrounds him. The figures nearest to the edges are Night, Delacroix borrowed the billowing canopies of green and
the largest. In size and form, they relate to the atlantes, sculpted violet fabric, and from Triumph of the Waters (Neptune and
in stucco, that support the frame of the painted compartment. Amphitrite), the human figures plummeting from the sky. The
This continuity with the ceiling’s sculptural decoration is figure of Diana escorting Apollo is a quotation from the more
particularly striking in the portrayals of the river gods, mon- recent ceiling executed by Prud’hon in the nearby gallery of
sters, and giants at the bottom of the composition. the Louvre, the Hall of Diana.⁷⁰
Delacroix also adapted his formal and iconographic The swirling, supernatural assemblage of figures in Apollo
repertoire to the ambience of the seventeenth century, known Slays the Python, unprecedented in Delacroix’s history paint-
as the Grand Siècle. The chariot of the Sun is inspired by the ing, owes a debt to his experiments the previous year with the
fountain of the same name carved in 1670 by Jean-Baptiste flower and fruit compositions. No other subjects had allowed
Tuby for the pool at the west end of the Gardens of Versailles.⁶⁹ Delacroix to arrange his forms and colors with such freedom,
In addition, the painter appropriated elements from the specifically, a total disregard for the laws of gravity. The artist

DRIVEN TO GREATNESS: 1833–54 145

 returned to the exercise four years later with a more con-
tained subject, the lion hunt, which he had chosen for the
state commission he had won for the Exposition Universelle of
1855. Delacroix had already tried his hand at the central group,
composed of a hunter, his horse, and a big feline. After
Horseman Attacked by a Leopard, which Lee Johnson dated
about 1835–40 (Národní Galerie, Prague), Delacroix further
developed the idea about 1849 with Arab Horseman Attacked by
a Lion (fig. 58) and, after widening the frame, with Tiger Hunt
in 1854 (Musée d’Orsay, Paris).⁷¹ In those works, the painter
discovered the ingredients of a master alchemist. The Arab
costume and accessories were a perfect vehicle for swirling
waves of dazzling fabric (red, white, blue) and shining gold-
work. The lion’s attack from below allowed him to entangle
the figures and, by means of dramatic foreshortening, bring
the three heads close together as the limbs radiated outward.
Finally, the rocky setting, sober and mysterious, highlighted
the savage splendor of the three-headed, twelve-limbed mon-
ster of fur, gold, and fabric.
Arab Horseman Attacked by a Lion, 1849/50. Oil on
FIG. 58
Emboldened by these experiments, Delacroix opened
wood, 17¼ x 15 in. (43.8 x 38.1 cm). Art Institute of
Chicago, Potter Palmer Collection (1922.403) (J 181)
up and replicated the figure group in numerous works (see,
for example, cat. 133) in what would amount to a virtuoso
performance. In Lion Hunt (cat. 135) he not only included two

CAT. 133 A Lion and a Tiger, Fighting, ca. 1854 FIG. 59Peter Paul Rubens. Hippopotamus and Crocodile Hunt, ca. 1616. Oil on
canvas, 975⁄8 in. x 10 ft. 63⁄8 in. (2.5 x 3.2 m). Bayerische
Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Alte Pinakothek, Munich (inv. 4797)

146 DELACROIX
CAT. 135 Lion Hunt (fragment), 1855

CAT. 134 Lion Hunt, sketch, 1854

147
 CAT. 136 Lion Hunt, 1855–56

great cats, three horses, and five hunters but also deliberately For his own Lion Hunt, Delacroix widened the scene and
placed himself in direct competition with Rubens, who had opted for a pyramidal rather than square composition, perhaps
painted four big-game hunting scenes for Maximilian I, elector under the influence of Rembrandt’s 1641 etching The Great
(later prince- elector) of Bavaria, beginning in 1615. Delacroix Lion Hunt. With his first sketch (cat. 134), Delacroix moved
had seen the Flemish artist’s Lion Hunt during his visit to the roaring animal to the left of center; he added a lioness and
Bordeaux in 1845 (it would be destroyed in a fire in 1870). made the main hunter’s rearing horse the central axis. The
The others were unknown to him except through the engrav- background reinforces this arrangement with a clump of trees
ings of Pieter Soutman, which he described in his Journal on in the center and the turquoise sky breaking through on either
January 25, 1847. Delacroix’s favorite was the Hippopotamus side. The painter attended closely to the harmonious tangle of
and Crocodile Hunt (fig. 59), the composition of which he forms, adding wounded hunters and horses. These figures,
found particularly effective: “In the Hippopotamus Hunt, the fallen to the ground, struggle to get back up, relaunching the
amphibious monster occupies the center; the riders, horses, action from bottom to top and establishing a circular movement.
and hounds are all attacking it furiously. The composition is Like Rubens, Delacroix took up the challenge of imbuing a
approximately in the shape of a Saint Andrew’s cross. . . . One sense of abundance and triumph in that fight to the death.
effect is beautiful beyond words; a great sheet of sky frames The painting was completed just in time for the opening
the whole on both sides . . . thus, the very simplicity of the of the Exposition Universelle in May 1855. “The energetic and
contrast gives incomparable movement, variety, and unity to glowing painting” delighted Gautier and Baudelaire but put
the whole picture.”⁷² off a number of other critics, even young ones such as Paul

150 DELACROIX
Mantz: “The composition is hard to understand, and it is only This mutable quality, central to Romanticism, was associated
after long and intense effort that the eye, making order from with the assertion of the unique, creative self. Delacroix gave
disorder, finds its bearings in that confusion of entangled men much thought to the concept of originality and deliberated on
and animals. The drawing is slack, the forms rumpled like old it in his Journal, which he resumed in 1847. There he was able
fabric. The lines flare up and twist about; it is the spectacle of not only to take stock of the passage of time, which gave
force rather than force itself.”⁷³ Maxime du Camp fumed perspective to the notion of the never-before-seen or reduced
about the painting, saying it “defies criticism. It is a vast logo- it to the latest fad, but also to look more critically, more
griph rendered in colors for which no words can be found. intently, and with greater experience than before at his own
It is a strange hodge-podge. . . . almost raving mad; even the work and that of his predecessors, owing to his deeper knowl-
harmony is slipshod, because all the colors have similar edge of art history.
value.”⁷⁴ Du Camp’s opinion was echoed by Pierre Petroz: The observations on originality that Delacroix recorded
“This strange jumble lacks M. Delacroix’s usual qualities while designing the ceiling for the Gallery of Apollo are
completely. . . . The color is very bright, but it flickers, and especially telling. The official confirmation of the commission
that chaos of reds, greens, yellows, and violets, all with the had come in early March 1850. From the start, Delacroix
same value, makes the Lion Hunt look like a tapestry.”⁷⁵ These understood that working on a historical monument would
critiques were similar to the ones Delacroix had received in demand a level of respect and adaptation that could imperil
1827–28 for The Death of Sardanapalus, which was not included his artistic freedom, compromise his originality, and open him
in the retrospective of 1855 and which these young critics had to accusations of imitation. In the following months, as he
never seen.⁷⁶ This time, however, the harshness was tempered worked on the project in earnest, he reflected on this matter.
by positive remarks about the painting’s decorative character.
The painting was damaged in a fire at the Musée des As I considered the composition for the ceiling . . . it
Beaux-Arts, Bordeaux in 1870, resulting in the loss of the struck me that a good picture is like a good dish. It is
landscape with turquoise sky. (The missing portion of the made of exactly the same ingredients as a bad one—
work is visible in the second version, cat. 136, where there is the artist does everything! How many magnificent
more space between the figures.) This and other losses to the compositions would be worthless without a pinch of
perimeter of the canvas have heightened the impression of salt from the hand of the great cook? In Rubens, the
chaos and density, but they have also accentuated the effect of power of this, whatever it may be, is astounding. It is
material abundance that Delacroix sought to capture by juxta- incredible what his temperament, his vis poetica, can
posing lion’s fur with gold embroidery, and glinting swords add to a composition without seeming to change it.
with gleaming fangs and claws. He used the same method of Yet it is only a turn of his style. It is the way he does it
juxtaposition to invite a comparison between the musculature that matters; what he works on is comparatively unim-
of human arms and horses’ legs. Animality and humanity were portant. The new is very old. You might even say that
paired in a ferocious choreography. it is the oldest thing of all.⁷⁷

A week later, commenting on writing and classical archi-

“The New Is Very Old”: Redefining Originality tecture, he added: “A great writer . . . takes expressions in
everyday use and, by giving them a special twist, changes them
The amazing ease with which Delacroix glided from one into something new. . . . When an architect of genius copies a
pictorial genre to another, immersing himself in the heteroge- great monument of antiquity he knows how to modify it so as
neous traditions of Rubens, Monnoyer, Veronese, Ribera, and to make it original. . . . Ordinary architects are only able to
the School of Fontainebleau, and moving from the register of make literal copies, with the result that they add to this humili-
austere pathos to that of decorative exuberance, may be dis- ating evidence of their own lack of ability, a failure even to
concerting. If his subjects were not new, and if his composi- imitate successfully.”⁷⁸
tions were inspired by those of illustrious predecessors or In July 1850, while taking the waters at Bad Ems, in
taken from his own earlier work, wherein lies his originality? Germany, Delacroix read Thomas Medwin’s Conversations of

DRIVEN TO GREATNESS: 1833–54 151

Lord Byron with great interest. He lingered especially over the experienced that with the cartoon as well after drawing almost
passages concerning the accusations of borrowing and plagia- dumb, uninflected contours around the figures.”⁸³
rism that were lodged against Byron. Happy to learn that one These reflections liberated Delacroix considerably in his
of his favorite authors was preoccupied with the same con- relation to the old masters. He had acquired enough confi-
cerns that were vexing him, Delacroix copied out his words: dence in his own artistic worth to regard their genius as suste-
nance for his further development rather than as an overbearing
I am taxed with being a plagiarist, when I am least or inhibiting influence. It was likely this sense of self-validation
conscious of being one; but I am not very scrupulous, that underlies an allegorical drawing executed about 1849–51,
I own, when I have a good idea, how I came into The Triumph of Genius over Envy (cat. 117), which plumbs a
possession of it. . . . As to originality, Goethe has too theme that had preoccupied him since his early maturity. He
much sense to pretend that he is not under obligations therefore felt justified in taking up and interpreting his prede-
to authors, ancient and modern. . . . ‘How difficult it cessors’ subjects and compositions. He wrote with increasing
is,’ said he [Byron], ‘to say any thing new!’ . . . Perhaps freedom about them, establishing comparisons and bridges
all nature and art could not supply a new idea. . . . It is between artists from different eras and disciplines (musicians,
a bad thing to have too good a memory.⁷⁹ painters, sculptors). He found virtue in certain of their “lapses,”
“imperfections,” “disproportions,” and “incompletions,”
Alongside his course of treatment, Delacroix visited Antwerp, factors that enhanced their charm, personality, the expressive-
Brussels, and Mechelen, experiences that revived his early ness and contrast of their works, and that “augmented the
enthusiasm for Rubens.⁸⁰ He quickly overcame his emotion effect” of the whole. He caught himself feeling slightly bored
upon seeing the paintings and focused on analyzing the mas- by Mozart’s graceful perfection, for example, and took a
ter’s methods, especially his halftone technique. Looking growing interest in the powerful and provocative irregularity
carefully at The Raising of the Cross (1610–11; Cathedral of Our of Beethoven, whom he had previously found unappealing.⁸⁴
Lady, Antwerp), which was being restored, he noted the Delacroix’s new preference for idiomatic pictorial lan-
precocious Antwerp master’s debt to Michelangelo: “He guage over “the priority of inventing certain ideas, certain
[Rubens] is still young and trying to please the pedants. Full striking effects,” led him to disdain punctilious imitators of
of Michelangelo. . . . [His mind] was imbued with sublime earlier styles, especially Ingres and his students Hippolyte
works; it cannot be said that he imitated. He had that side to Flandrin and Henri Lehmann, who had adopted the dry,
him, along with others. . . . It is clear that he did not imitate; linear manner of ancient Greek painting and the Italian and
he is always Rubens. All this will be useful for my ceiling Flemish Primitives.⁸⁵
[Apollo Slays the Python].”⁸¹ Delacroix reassured himself by
comparing Rubens’s early style to that of his own youth, which Our Primitives, our Byzantines, who are so mulish
was also marked by Michelangelo’s powerful magnetism. “I had about style, their eyes always fixed on images from
that feeling when I began [my career?]. Perhaps I was indebted another time, take from them only their stiffness with-
to others, too, for it. Painters of each generation in turn have out adding qualities of their own. That mob of sad
been exalted and elevated by studying Michelangelo.”⁸² mediocrities is vast. . . . What can be found in those
When he returned from Belgium in mid-August 1850, pictures of the true man who painted them?⁸⁶
work began on positioning the composition on the ceiling.
Delacroix continued to consult paintings by Rubens and Raphael’s gestures are naïve in spite of the strangeness
Veronese in nearby galleries of the Louvre, but less as a subor- of his style. What is odious is when fools imitate his
dinate looking for artistic inspiration than as a colleague seek- strangeness, and are false in gesture and intention into
ing expert technical advice. “I noticed how straightforward the bargain. Ingres, who has never learned to compose
shadow and light are in P. Veronese’s Susanna [and the Elders], a subject as nature presents it, believes that he resem-
even in the foregrounds. In a vast composition like the ceiling, bles Raphael because he apes certain forms which are
that is all the more necessary. . . . The contours are also very characteristic of the master. These do actually give his
pronounced, a new way of being clear from a distance. I work a kind of grace, reminiscent of Raphael, but with

152 DELACROIX
 CAT. 117 The Triumph of Genius over Envy, ca. 1849–51

the latter you are very conscious that they come natu- and increasingly fluid manner. From tradition he borrowed
rally and are not deliberately cultivated.⁸⁷ compositional structures and chromatic harmonies, the effec-
tiveness of which had been proved over generations. These
Painters who pursue that primitive dryness, a practice he adapted and translated into his own idiom, which
quite natural in schools still feeling their way and he undoubtedly esteemed to be of his time. His sources
drawing on almost backward sources, are like grown were not restricted to old master paintings. In the 1840s,
men who, in order to look ingenuous, would imitate Delacroix began to appropriate elements from certain of his
children’s speech and movements.⁸⁸ own earlier works, and to modify and develop them further
in new ones.
Respect for the permanence of certain principles was
not to be confused with the imitation of obsolete pictorial
language. “True primitives are original talents. La Fontaine, “I Am the Penitent”: Reprises and Variations
who seems pure imitation, actually proceeds on the basis of
his own genius.”⁸⁹ “You can speak only in your own tongue, Delacroix never stopped discovering new subjects and broad-
and also, only in the spirit of your own times. Those who hear ening his horizons.⁹¹ At the end of his life, he took an interest
you must be able to understand you, but above all, you must in chivalric romances, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and stories from
understand yourself.”⁹⁰ Delacroix’s own language distin- the Gospels that he had not already addressed in his work. At
guished his style from those of all others. Using a technique the same time that he was expanding his repertoire, he was
that involved the superposition, intermingling, and simultane- also returning to subjects he had treated previously. There are
ous contrast of colors, he applied oil paint in a free, vibrant, several reasons for this reengagement. It was impelled in part

DRIVEN TO GREATNESS: 1833–54 153

 by the tradition, observed by many artists, of repeating com-
positions that had found an appreciative audience—of satisfy-
ing the demands of the market. Painted replicas of Medea About
to Kill Her Children are a good example. Interest in Medea had
been revived by the distribution of a beautiful, large lithograph
by Emile Lassalle that was exhibited at the Salon of 1857.
Delacroix was asked to do three new painted versions of the
composition: the first, now destroyed, in 1859 for the art
dealer and collector Jean-Hector Bouruet-Aubertot; the second
in 1862 for the banker Emile Pereire, through the intermedi-
ary of Etienne François Haro; and the third the same year
for the Société des Amis des Arts, Arras, represented by
Constant Dutilleux.⁹²
Reformulations of paintings could also result from the
gradual evolution of a favorite motif, which Delcroix would
FIG. 60 Young Woman Attacked by a Tiger (Indian Woman Bitten by a Tiger),
explore in various configurations simultaneously or in succes-
1856. Oil on canvas, 201⁄16 x 241⁄8 in. (51 x 61.3 cm). Staatsgalerie Stuttgart
(inv. 2695) (J 201) sion. Such was the case with the hunter on his mount attacked
by a great cat, a group that was perfected and multiplied until
it reached a first culmination in oil: the large Lion Hunt (see
cat. 135). The motif then evolved along a different course.
No longer were new protagonists added; rather, a more spa-
cious composition was created, along with a greater interplay
of receding planes.⁹³ Parallel to these complex compositions,
where the hunters on horseback lead the choreography,
Delacroix worked on many scenes with two figures, in which
a great cat is shown tearing its prey—human or animal—to
pieces. Lion Devouring a Rabbit, Lion Devouring an Arab, and
Young Woman Attacked by a Tiger (also known as Indian Woman
Bitten by a Tiger, fig. 60) occupy cavernous landscapes filled
with disturbing clumps of spiny plants (agaves or bulrushes).⁹⁴
The preliminary drawings for the tiger painting demonstrate
the decisive role of the formal interplay of two tangled,
undulating bodies, those of the feline and the young woman,
perhaps inspired by the dryads (salabhanjika) of ancient
Buddhist art.⁹⁵
Another highly prized motif, that of the young woman
who has fallen prey to male violence in a dark, rocky setting,
was a topos of gothic romance and Romantic melodrama,
genres that profoundly shaped the visual imaginary of
Delacroix’s generation. The motif proved so durable that it
survived the literary genre that spawned it. Hence, the abduc-
tion of Rebecca by the Knight Templar outside the flaming
Castle of Front- de-Boeuf, first painted in 1846 (see cat. 105),
FIG. 61The Bride of Abydos, ca. 1852–53. Oil on canvas, 14 x 1013⁄16 in. was reprised in 1858 (see cat. 141), well after Delacroix had
(35.5 x 27.5 cm). Musée du Louvre, Paris (RF 1398) (J 311) lost his taste for Sir Walter Scott’s historical novels.

154 DELACROIX
 CAT. 139 The Bride of Abydos (Selim and Zuleika), 1857

After 1849, the year Delacroix completed the last of his the pose of the young woman, who crouches and looks away
paintings based on Byron’s epic poem The Giaour, Byron’s as she attempts with one hand to hold back her lover’s arm
poetry yielded up only one subject for the artist: that of the and with the other grips his shoulder, could easily be misinter-
doomed lovers portrayed in The Bride of Abydos. The scene, preted as a defensive one. However, close examination reveals
set outside a cave on the banks of the Hellespont, shows the that she is by no means Selim’s target. Rather, she is trying to
pirate Selim preparing to defend himself against the troops of dissuade the cornered warrior from engaging in a futile fight
Sultan Giaffir, sent to prevent him from running off with the against his assailants, who are barely discernible in the back-
sultan’s daughter. Delacroix painted two initial versions of the ground. There is reason to believe that Delacroix was aware of
episode: one about 1849 and another in 1852. He favored the ambiguity of the woman’s pose and intentionally fostered
the third rendering (fig. 61), which he reiterated with chro- it. In Desdemona Cursed by Her Father (fig. 62), a painting
matic variations in a fourth work made for his landlord, Jules exactly contemporaneous with the 1852 Bride of Abydos and
Hurel, in 1857 (cat. 139).⁹⁶ In the 1852 version and its copy, with a nearly identical composition, he employed the same

DRIVEN TO GREATNESS: 1833–54 155

 Desdemona Cursed by Her Father, 1852. Oil on canvas, 23¼ x 195⁄16 in. (59 x 49 cm). Musée
FIG. 62
des Beaux-Arts, Reims (inv. 907.19.89) (J 309)

motif to portray a young woman as victim: Desdemona, shown Delacroix was soon dissatisfied with producing this type of
kneeling before her onrushing father, raises her arms to his light fare for art lovers to enjoy in private; he also rejected the
chest as he lashes out at her in anger. idea of painting the female nude at the scale of history paint-
The development of a motif could thus exceed the ing, in the manner of Ingres’s Odalisque. He therefore moved
narrative confines of the original reference and circulate from away from the subject, preferring the ethnographic veracity of
one genre to another. Take, for instance, the topos of the Women of Algiers (see cat. 83). Nearly twenty years later, through
reclining female nude observed by a male onlooker. In his his memories of the Maghreb and his meditation on Rembrandt,
youth, Delacroix had used this motif in small erotic pictures Delacroix found his way back to the motif of the desirable
inspired by Pierre de Bourdeille Brantôme’s titillating reclining nude and enhanced it with a mysterious aura.
memoirs and eighteenth- century galante painting. A Lady and The small-format odalisques undertaken at the end of
Her Valet (cat. 32), for example, features a seductively posed the 1840s (for example, fig. 63) lack the effrontery of the
woman feigning sleep while a servant she fancies looks on. courtesans of the 1820s. Their nudity is in soft focus and

156 DELACROIX
relatively reserved, their accessories are more prominent, that the painter finally saw the play performed in English.¹⁰¹
and shadows close in around them, creating a vague sense Although abridged, the production was the first in France to
of menace. The second version of Women of Algiers (see include the play’s most violent scenes, previously censored or
fig. 32) and Othello and Desdemona (see fig. 116) were painted skirted: the appearance of the ghost in the first act, Ophelia’s
at the same time and were exhibited together at the Salon of madness in the fourth, and the gravediggers scene in act 5.¹⁰²
1849. By means of the works’ shared theatrical props (heavy That experience probably triggered the proliferation of
curtains, luxurious accessories) and mirror compositions Hamlets in Delacroix’s iconographic repertoire. Responding
(each has a standing figure on one side opposite a reclining to the play, the painter wrote: “The English have opened up
female figure on the other), Delacroix demonstrated how their theater. They are working wonders. . . . Our actors are
different genres can enrich each other. In Women of Algiers he learning from them; their eyes have been opened. The conse-
elevated a scene of manners to the rank of history painting not quences of this innovation are incalculable.”¹⁰³ Critics, the
by means of format, as he had done in 1834, but through the intelligentsia, and Parisian high society seemed to agree with
dramatic expressiveness of light and shade; and in Othello and Delacroix; all gave the English Hamlet an enthusiastic recep-
Desdemona, a great tragic scene inspired by theater and opera, tion. The artist certainly saw the publication that was issued as
he conjured a hushed, mysterious atmosphere through mas- a memento of the production. Published under the title
tery of the decorative effects of textiles and goldwork.⁹⁷ The Souvenirs du théâtre anglais à Paris, it comprised a series of
large red bed in A Lady and Her Valet (cat. 32), the contorted illustrations by Achille Devéria and Louis Boulanger that
pose in Odalisque (fig. 63), and the coarseness of the attendant conveyed the main lines of the set and poses struck by the
in Cleopatra and the Peasant (see cat. 95) are assembled and leading actors.¹⁰⁴ Their costumes, which established the
transcended in this staging of Desdemona’s final moments. The standard that held for the next seventy years, were far more
art of the colorist and the theater director, along with the skill- precisely described.¹⁰⁵ Delacroix, too, adhered to this stan-
ful interplay of resonating motifs, allowed Delacroix to break dard in his many representations of the protagonist, whose
down the traditional divide separating genre painters from all-black attire changed very little over the decades: trunk
history painters, while avoiding the anecdotal. hose (puffy, thigh-length breeches worn over long stockings),
Finally, the reprise of a theatrical subject could be wide-sleeved cloak, cape worn over the shoulder, biretta with
induced not only by the expressive pleasure and formal free long plumes, and sword. The exception, found in the 1843
play associated with a motif, but also by developments in stage engraving showing Hamlet wearing Horatio’s light- colored
productions that Delacroix attended and by his evolving view doublet, is also based on the 1827 production in Paris.
of a favorite character—Hamlet, most notably, whom he usu- The same spirit of competition (“what has been said has
ally portrayed with the skull of the jester Yorick, in the famous not yet been said enough”)¹⁰⁶ that led Delacroix to measure
gravedigger scene. Delacroix probably saw a version of the himself against Moritz Retzsch in the Faust series may well have
play in Paris in his youth, with the actor François Joseph Talma spurred him to outdo Devéria and Boulanger’s mediocre illus-
playing the title character. Talma was a client of the young trations of Hamlet.¹⁰⁷ In a lithograph of 1828 (see fig. 64),
painter, and Hamlet was Talma’s defining role from 1803 until he presented his personal interpretation of a scene that seems
his death in 1826. However, the version of the play he starred to have attracted him from the start, that in which Hamlet
in, a highly altered, expurgated adaptation by Jean François meditates on the skull of Yorick.¹⁰⁸ Based on a watercolor
Ducis, bore little resemblance to the original.⁹⁸ Delacroix was study, the print shows the three characters—Hamlet, Horatio,
staying with his brother in Touraine in August–September 1822, and one of the gravediggers—stylized to the point of caricature
when Samson Penley’s troupe presented the first English- in a landscape far more ambitious than that of Devéria and
language production of Hamlet in Paris.⁹⁹ During the painter’s Boulanger. The augmented setting permitted Delacroix to
visit to London three years later, he regretted not having the unite in a single image two successive scenes from the play:
opportunity to see Edmund Kean’s famous performance as Hamlet’s meditation on Yorick’s skull and the departure of
Hamlet at the Drury Lane Theater.¹⁰⁰ It was not until September Ophelia’s funeral cortege from Elsinore Castle. In the fantasti-
1827, when Charles Kemble, manager of the Covent Garden cal and grotesque spirit of Faust, Delacroix juxtaposed the
Theater, brought Hamlet to the Théâtre de l’Odéon in Paris, gravedigger’s physical deformity with the lugubrious and

158 DELACROIX
somewhat frightening procession of hooded figures adapted scrambled the codes of specific genres. Delacroix, eschewing
from the witches’ sabbath scene in Faust. The lithograph was literary illustration and the theatricality of history painting,
an isolated effort. There is no way of knowing what prompted created an ambiguous work, one that is simultaneously a
Delacroix to publish six years later, at his own expense, and landscape painting, a vanitas, and a posthumous portrait.
independent of any text, a suite of lithographs based on Hamlet. That was probably the reason why the canvas was
Was he inspired by the new edition of Le Tourneur’s transla- rejected by the jury for the Salon of 1836 and, consequently,
tion, published by Henri Horace Meyer the same year?¹⁰⁹ heralded as a Romantic manifesto by proponents of artistic
He executed six scenes in 1834 and 1835, omitting the freedom. Shortly after the Salon opened, the painting was
gravediggers episode, which he reserved for an oil painting purchased by Achille Ricourt, director of the review L’artiste,
done for the Salon of 1835 (cat. 86). This was the first work who used it as the rallying point for a media campaign directed
with a Shakespearean motif that Delaroix produced with the against what was judged to be the tyrannical interference of
Salon in view, and it was also the one that diverged the most the Académie in the workings of the Salon and the jury’s
from the text. Did he intend it to announce the publication decision. In addition to many articles in defense of the paint-
of the lithographs? Should the painting be understood as a ing by Gustave Planche, Alfred de Musset, Alexandre-Gabriel
kind of frontispiece? The scene depicted does not correspond Decamps, Roger de Beauvoir, and others, the review published
to any moment in the play: though it is set in the churchyard, a lithograph of it followed by an homage in poetry by Louise
the gravediggers are absent. Hamlet, wearing neither plumed Colet.¹¹² A wood engraving accompanied by a laudatory article
hat nor sword—the distinguishing attributes of a gentleman— was published the following year in Le magasin pittoresque.¹¹³
is seated with one foot in the grave. Backlit by a hot, late- Encouraged by these demonstrations of support but
afternoon sky, Horatio waits, impassive, lost in his own thoughts. eager to reach a compromise with the jury so that his favorite
The landscape, a vast, deserted wasteland enclosed by white- Shakespearean subject could be exhibited at the Salon,
washed walls, might have been inspired by the artist’s memories Delacroix executed a new oil painting for the Salon of 1839,
of Moroccan graveyards or of the old cemetery in Toulon, simultaneous with a Death of Ophelia.¹¹⁴ He reformulated the
abandoned in 1829, which Delacroix described to his friend gravedigger scene, this time hewing close to the text and the
Jean-Baptiste Pierret when he returned from Morocco.¹¹⁰ theatrical context (cat. 96). The composition is far more narra-
The familiar scene of animated dialogue is replaced here tive than the preceding one: the cynical gravediggers reap-
by a majestic, static, silent tableau. Each character has with- pear, their animation and plebeian directness contrasting with
drawn into himself. Whereas a preliminary drawing shows the the patrician reserve of the two gentlemen. Hamlet, his deli-
two friends together, their faces lowered in communion as cate white hand and gold ring highlighted against the deep
they contemplate Yorick’s skull, in the finished painting they black of his cloak, possesses the sober elegance of Titian’s
are separated, with faces raised.¹¹¹ Each looks straight ahead, Man with a Glove (ca. 1520; Musée du Louvre). He reacts with
absorbed in his own thoughts; the communication is broken. a movement of revulsion to the skull brandished by one of the
The representation of Hamlet follows the codes of posthumous laborers. The characters are tightly framed, their attention
portraiture seen in Delacroix’s portrait of Rabelais (Musée de concentrated on the skull, the focal point of the composition.
Chinon), completed the previous year. The prince is ren- The painting was accepted by the Salon jury in February 1839
dered full-length, with a gravestone for his throne, the court and honored by the crown prince, who bought it.
jester’s skull as his celestial globe, and an abandoned grave- That critical success was immediately followed by the
yard as his kingdom. Lacking crown and scepter, he seems to publication of at least three different prints in illustrated
be submitting to the sham of a sardonic royal portrait. The magazines.¹¹⁵ It wasn’t until four years later, however, in 1843,
wobbly gravestone and foot disappearing into the muddy hole that Delacroix finally executed his own lithograph of the
convey better than any struck pose the complexity of the scene, completing the suite he had initiated in 1834.¹¹⁶ The
character, whose indecisiveness and simulated buffoonery composition of the print reverses that of the 1839 painting
mask his profound disgust with the vanity of the world and his with only slight variation (fig. 65). Delacroix added prominent
thoughts of suicide. This effigy of Hamlet as the prince of narrative details (the gravedigger’s pickax, the churchyard
darkness, on the edge of the abyss of buried illusions, cross, Elsinore Castle) and accentuated the hierarchy within

160 DELACROIX
FIG. 64 Hamlet Contemplating Yorick’s Skull, 1828. Lithograph with chine collé, third state of FIG. 65Hamlet and Horatio with the Gravediggers, 1843.
three, image 119⁄16 x 147⁄8 in. (29.3 x 37.8 cm), sheet 165⁄8 x 19½ in. (42.2 x 49.5 cm). The Lithograph, second state of four, image 11¼ x 8¼ in.
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, The Elisha Whittelsley Collection, The Elisha (28.5 x 21 cm), sheet 12½ x 95⁄16 in. (31.8 x 23.7 cm).
Wittelsley Fund, 2018 (2018.79) (D-S 75) The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Rogers
Fund, 1922 (22.56.16) (D-S 116)

the chiasma linking the two secondary characters (the grave- on the coloration of the human figures or any other compo-
digger viewed from the back and a smaller Horatio) to the two nents of the foreground: seen in contre-jour, they should
principal characters. The gravedigger holding the skull has logically be very dark. This inconsistency must be responsible
been moved closer to Hamlet, who, larger than Horatio and for the impression of preciosity and naïveté, which displeased
with his weight on his right leg, appears more assertive. the critics at the Salon of 1859. The transfer of the beard from
It would be natural to imagine that, having used the same Horatio’s face to Hamlet’s can be explained by the refashion-
formal solution in both the painting and the lithograph, ing of the character of Hamlet on the French stage in 1846–
Delacroix would feel no need to treat the gravedigger scene 47. The actor Philibert Rouvière played the lead role in a new
again. Nonetheless, in 1859 he returned to it, one last time in version of the play that was adapted and translated by Alexandre
oil, in a manner that exemplifies his late creative process Dumas and Paul Meurice. Baudelaire commented admiringly
(fig. 66). In scrupulously replicating the composition of the on the impassioned, tempestuous acting of Rouvière, who was
lithograph of 1828, he returned to his original approach to the immortalized in the role in a portrait by Edouard Manet
subject. He faithfully transposed all the elements present in (1866; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.).¹¹⁷
the lithograph while enhancing it with new narrative ele- An important aspect of the 1859 painting that has been
ments: a liquor bottle planted in the overturned earth in the little discussed is its reversal of two traditional practices.
foreground, the second gravedigger in the middle ground, Typically, the painted rendering of a composition precedes
Ophelia’s coffin and torches for the funeral procession. The the print version, which functions to disseminate the original
blazing sky, a reminder of the 1835 painting (see cat. 86), image. The genesis of this Hamlet and Horatio can therefore be
bathes the scene in a glowing, unreal light that has no effect interpreted as a reversal of the traditional relationship of

162 DELACROIX