Eugene Delacroix

Ferdinand Victor Eugene Delacroix was born on April 26, 1798, in Charenton-Saint-Maurice, a small town just outside Paris ^[1]. His official father, Charles-François Delacroix, had served as foreign minister of France and later as a prefect under Napoleon; his mother, Victoire Oeben, came from a distinguished family of cabinetmakers who had worked for the royal court ^[2]. Persistent rumor, repeated by contemporaries and weighed by later biographers, held that the diplomat Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand was the boy's natural father, a claim that has never been proven and that Delacroix himself never publicly addressed ^[3].

The family's fortunes declined quickly. Charles-François died in 1805, Victoire in 1814, and the sixteen year old Eugene was left with little money and an education at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand in Paris, where he had won prizes in classics and drawing ^[1]. Music and literature marked him early: he read Dante, Shakespeare, and Byron with an appetite that would supply subjects for paintings across his whole career ^[2].

In 1815 an uncle steered him toward the studio of Pierre-Narcisse Guérin, a respected Neoclassical painter, and the following year Delacroix enrolled at the École des Beaux-Arts ^[1]. More decisive than any formal lesson was his friendship with a slightly older student from the same studio, Théodore Géricault. Delacroix watched Géricault paint The Raft of the Medusa and even posed for one of its dying figures, an experience he later recalled as electrifying ^[3].

Delacroix announced himself at the Salon of 1822 with The Barque of Dante, a dark, turbulent scene drawn from the Inferno that showed Dante and Virgil crossing the waters around the city of Dis ^[1]. The picture divided critics, but the French state purchased it, an unusual endorsement for a painter of twenty four ^[2]. That same year he began the private journal he would keep, with a long interruption, until his death, recording studio practice, gallery visits, and reflections on art that scholars still mine today ^[4].

Two years later he exhibited The Massacre at Chios, a response to Ottoman atrocities against Greek civilians during the Greek War of Independence ^[1]. Its loose handling and unheroic composition scandalized defenders of the classical school, yet the government bought this canvas too, and the young painter found himself cast, somewhat against his own wishes, as the standard bearer of the Romantic movement in France ^[3]. Delacroix disliked the label; he considered himself a classicist in discipline, whatever the fever of his subjects ^[4].

His reputation for audacity peaked with The Death of Sardanapalus at the Salon of 1827, a swirling, blood soaked fantasy loosely inspired by Byron in which an Assyrian king watches the destruction of his possessions, horses, and concubines from his deathbed ^[1]. Officials were appalled, commissions briefly dried up, and Delacroix later admitted the picture had cost him dearly. During these same years he produced a celebrated suite of seventeen lithographs illustrating Goethe's Faust, published in 1828; Goethe himself praised them ^[5].

Any account of Eugene Delacroix achievements begins with Liberty Leading the People, painted in the autumn of 1830 after the July Revolution toppled Charles X ^[2]. The picture, in which a bare breasted allegorical figure of Liberty strides over a barricade holding the tricolor flag, was bought by the new government of Louis-Philippe, then kept out of sight for years as politically inflammatory. It now hangs in the Louvre and has become one of the most reproduced political images ever painted ^[1].

In 1832 Delacroix accompanied the Count de Mornay on a diplomatic mission to the Sultan of Morocco, with stops in Algiers and southern Spain ^[1]. The journey transformed his art. He filled notebooks with watercolors and observations, convinced that he had found in North African life a living antiquity more authentic than anything in plaster casts. The trip yielded roughly a hundred paintings and countless drawings over the following decades, including Women of Algiers in Their Apartment (1834), a work Renoir, Picasso, and Matisse would all later reinterpret ^[5].

From the mid 1830s the July Monarchy entrusted him with the largest decorative programs of the age: the Salon du Roi and the library of the Palais Bourbon, the library of the Luxembourg Palace, and a ceiling for the Galerie d'Apollon in the Louvre, completed in 1851 ^[2]. His final monumental work, the Chapel of the Holy Angels in the church of Saint-Sulpice in Paris, occupied him for over a decade and was finished in 1861, two years before his death; its mural of Jacob wrestling the angel is often read as a summation of his own struggle with painting ^[3].

Underlying all of it was a theory of color. Delacroix observed that shadows contain the complementary of the object's color, laid tones side by side rather than blending them, and treated color, not line, as the engine of expression ^[4]. These ideas, absorbed by Impressionists and codified by the Neo-Impressionists, are among the most consequential Eugene Delacroix facts for the history of modern art ^[6].

Delacroix never married and had no children. Guarded and dandyish in society, he reserved his candor for the Journal and for a small circle of intimates ^[4]. His closest musical friendship was with Frédéric Chopin, whom he painted in 1838 alongside the novelist George Sand in a double portrait that was later cut in two; the Chopin fragment is now in the Louvre ^[5]. He visited the couple at Sand's country house at Nohant and wrote about Chopin's playing with the reverence of a fellow craftsman ^[4].

Chronic throat trouble, probably tuberculous in origin, shadowed him from the 1840s onward and forced long retreats to spas and to a modest country house he bought at Champrosay, south of Paris ^[3]. Through these years his household was managed by his devoted housekeeper Jenny Le Guillou, who protected his time and his health, and who was with him when he died ^[1].

He was also an early and curious observer of photography, joining the Société Héliographique in 1851 and using photographs of models as studies, even as he argued in the Journal that the camera could serve painting but never replace it ^[5].

Official honors came slowly. Delacroix was made an officer of the Legion of Honor and served on the Paris municipal council, yet the Institut de France rejected his candidacy repeatedly; he was finally elected to the Académie des Beaux-Arts in 1857, on roughly his eighth attempt ^[2]. That same year he moved to an apartment and garden studio on the rue de Furstenberg, near Saint-Sulpice, chosen so that the ailing painter could walk to his chapel murals ^[1].

The Exposition Universelle of 1855 in Paris devoted a retrospective gallery to him, showing dozens of his works alongside those of Ingres, his great classical counterpart, and confirming his stature for a younger generation ^[3]. The poet and critic Charles Baudelaire became his most eloquent champion, writing that Delacroix was passionately in love with passion and coldly determined to express it ^[6].

Worn down by fever and a worsening throat condition, Delacroix died in his Paris apartment on August 13, 1863, at the age of sixty five, and was buried in Père Lachaise cemetery ^[1]. The posthumous studio sale in 1864 revealed the sheer scale of his output: thousands of paintings, watercolors, pastels, and drawings that even his admirers had never seen ^[2].

Anyone asking who was Eugene Delacroix for painters of the next hundred years finds a straightforward answer: the bridge between the old masters and modern color. Manet and Fantin-Latour copied his canvases in the Louvre; Cézanne planned an apotheosis of Delacroix; van Gogh copied his Pietà and named him among his essential teachers ^[6]. The Neo-Impressionist Paul Signac made the debt explicit in his 1899 treatise From Eugene Delacroix to Neo-Impressionism, tracing divided color from Delacroix's murals to pointillism ^[6].

His Journal, first published in 1893, secured a second reputation as a writer. Its mixture of technical notes, gossip, and reflection on beauty, memory, and the limits of finish has kept it in print in many languages, and it remains one of the most quoted documents left by any artist ^[4].

The rue de Furstenberg apartment where he died is now the Musée National Eugène-Delacroix, administered with the Louvre, which itself holds the largest collection of his major works, including Liberty Leading the People and The Death of Sardanapalus ^[7]. Major retrospectives at the Louvre and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2018 drew enormous crowds, evidence that this Eugene Delacroix biography is still being written by each generation that stands in front of his color ^[5].