Age of Revolution
Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863)
French Romanticism painter.
Eugène Delacroix was the leader of French Romanticism in painting, the great antagonist of the Neoclassical line who staked everything on colour, movement, and passion. Emerging in the 1820s, he set his surging, painterly art against the cold contour of David's heirs — above all Ingres — insisting that colour and the imagination, not drawing alone, were the soul of painting. His breakthrough 'The Massacre at Chios' (1824) brought contemporary atrocity into the Salon on a heroic scale, and 'The Death of Sardanapalus' (1827) scandalized critics with its whirlpool of violence, flesh, and jewelled colour.
In 1830 he painted 'Liberty Leading the People', an allegory of the July Revolution that fused reportage and myth into one of the most enduring political images ever made. A journey to Morocco and Algeria in 1832 gave him a lifetime of North African subjects, among them 'Women of Algiers in their Apartment'. Throughout, he kept a remarkable 'Journal', a public-domain record of his reflections on art in which he worked out his convictions about colour — that it obeys discernible laws, that reflected half-tints give the true tone, and that the colourist grasps painting whole.
Delacroix's optical use of juxtaposed, vibrating colour became a bridge to the future. Van Gogh returned again and again in his letters to Delacroix's colour as a model; Cézanne revered him and planned an 'Apotheosis of Delacroix'; and through the Impressionists and the divisionist theory Signac traced back to him, his colour lineage reached Renoir and beyond. He died in Paris in 1863, having reshaped what painting could feel like.
The words the record keeps using: passionate, vehement, colouristic, dramatic, restless, romantic, sensuous.
At a glance
- Lived 1798–1863
- Origin French
- Worked in Paris
- Era Age of Revolution
- Movements Romanticism
- Mediums Oil on canvas
- Techniques Alla prima (wet-in-wet), Broken color
Works in the archive
- Scenes from the Massacre at Chios, 1824 (Musée du Louvre, Paris)
Delacroix's response to the Ottoman massacre of the Greek population of Chios in 1822, during the Greek War of Independence. In the foreground exhausted, despairing captives await death or enslavement while a mounted… - The Death of Sardanapalus, 1827 (Musée du Louvre, Paris)
Inspired by Byron, the Assyrian king Sardanapalus reclines on his great red bed and watches, impassive, as his guards slaughter his concubines, horses, and treasure so that nothing he loved will survive him. A tumult of… - Liberty Leading the People, 1830 (Musée du Louvre, Paris)
Commemorating the July Revolution of 1830, a bare-breasted personification of Liberty strides over the barricade dead, tricolour in one hand and musket in the other, leading a crowd of fighters — bourgeois, worker, and… - Women of Algiers in their Apartment, 1834 (Musée du Louvre, Paris)
Drawn from Delacroix's 1832 journey to North Africa, three women sit in the dim, richly furnished interior of an Algiers household, a servant drawing back a curtain at right. Rather than a violent drama, it is a study…
What was said
In his Journal Delacroix reflected that the reflected half-tint is the principle that must predominate, for it gives an object its true tone and its living character; light, which the schools overvalue, is really only an accident. Colour, he held, is governed by fixed laws that can be studied like music.
Cézanne declared that Delacroix's remained the finest palette in France and that no one possessed such combined calm and pathos or such vibration of colour — saying, in effect, that his generation all painted 'in' Delacroix.
In his letters van Gogh repeatedly held up Delacroix as the master of colour, studying his complementary contrasts and his expressive, non-literal use of hue as a guide for his own painting in the south of France.
Lineage
Learned from Paolo Veronese, John Constable, Théodore Géricault
Passed on to Paul Cézanne, Vincent van Gogh, Pierre-Auguste Renoir
What would Eugène make of your idea?
The Artiquity Studio makes a new picture in this hand's manner from a few words or a photograph — grounded in the technique, palette and subjects recorded above, and always credited "after Eugène Delacroix", never passed off as a found work. Open the Studio with Eugène · Keep a life moment the way Eugène would · Pictures made after Eugène