Eugène Delacroix
The colourful heart of Romanticism.
Delacroix painted dramatic subjects from history, literature and his own times. His journey to Morocco in 1832 made his colours glow even more.
Eugène Delacroix was born in 1798 in Charenton-Saint-Maurice near Paris. His father was a politician and diplomat. An old rumour, never proven, holds that his biological father was in fact the diplomat Talleyrand. Delacroix was orphaned as a teenager. He studied under Pierre-Narcisse Guérin and became friends with Théodore Géricault, whose Raft of the Medusa made a strong impression on him.
He made his Salon debut in 1822 with Dante and Virgil in the Underworld, also known as The Barque of Dante. Two years later The Massacre at Chios (1824) caused an uproar. It depicts Turkish troops massacring Greeks during the Greek War of Independence. The Death of Sardanapalus (1827) shows an Oriental king who has his women and horses killed before he dies himself. The best known is Liberty Leading the People (1830), in which a woman carrying the tricolour leads the people during the July Revolution. All of these are in the Louvre.
In 1832 Delacroix accompanied a French diplomatic mission to Morocco. He was enraptured by the light, the colours and the clothes, and filled sketchbooks with watercolours. The journey gave him subjects for the rest of his life, among them Women of Algiers (1834) in the Louvre. He also received major commissions for public buildings, such as the ceiling painting in the Galerie d'Apollon in the Louvre and murals in the church of Saint-Sulpice in Paris, among them Jacob Wrestling with the Angel.
Delacroix believed that colour mattered more than line. He placed colours side by side so that they intensified each other and let the brushstrokes show. He became the leader of Romanticism and the counterpart to Ingres. He kept a famous journal and was a brilliant writer. His friends included the composer Frédéric Chopin and the writer George Sand. He never married and was looked after by his loyal housekeeper.
Delacroix died in Paris in 1863. His last home and studio is now a museum. The Impressionists, Van Gogh and the Neo-Impressionists studied his handling of colour closely, and Cézanne and Picasso copied his works.