EUGENE DELACROIX AT THE NATIONAL GALLERY, LONDON

EUGENE DELACROIX AT THE NATIONAL GALLERY, LONDON

Eugene Delacroix (1798-1863) was a product of the post-revolutionary era in France, glimpsing the bitter end results of Napoleon's campaigns, the restoration of the Bourbons, annotating the upheaval of 1830 which was to lead to 1848 and the era of the second French Republic and then the second French Empire under Napoleon the Third.

Delacroix was born on the eve of a new century and his parents were older than is the norm when his mother conceived. His father apparently had a two stone tumor removed from his left testicle at the same time as he was supposedly procreating.  Charles-Francois Delacroix was Minister of Foreign Affairs, his successor in the post was Talleyrand.  Therefore, many believe that Eugene's real father was Talleyrand (1754-1838), a ubiquitous Enlightenment figure simultaneously berating nuns and the like while continuing elicit affairs with scions of the rich.  However, it must be said that there is no evidence to suggest this apart from circumstance.  Eugene's brother was cut down at the Battle of Friedland in 1807 and another brother served under Napoleon, rising to become a Baron before suffering abject demotion after Waterloo.  A sister married a wealthy yet indolent man.  Then Delacroix created the archetypal image that might be said to represent France itself by painting Liberty leading the People, painted after the 1830 revolution.  This is an icon of immediate passionate resonance.  Delacroix marks the start of the Romantic movement in France, sweeping aside the cold Neo-Classical surfaces of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1780-1867), his chief rival.  His friends included the art critic and poet, Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867) who also supported the idea of a proper monument after Delacroix’s death in 1863.

THE RAFT OF THE MEDUSA

The National Gallery's Delacroix retrospective concentrates on Delacroix's influence among his contemporaries and successors rather than depicting successive themes in Delacroix's art.  It is as if Delacroix's own art somehow flows into the work of those around him setting off a spontaneous, combustible influence.  It does not begin with Delacroix's development but that is vitally important in understanding his art.  Delacroix was influenced by artists of the past such as Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640) and by his contemporary Theodore Gericault (1791-1824), especially his work The Raft of the Medusa which serves as a condemnation of the inadequacy and failures of the Ancien Regime.  At the time the scandal of the Meduse, a French frigate that ran aground off the coast of Mauritania, rocked France.  The four hundred people on board the frigate could not fit onto the lifeboats whose limited capacity was just two hundred and fifty so a makeshift raft was constructed for the remainder.  The ship's Captain, an emigre who gained his commission as an act of preferment on the part of the Bourbons who had regained their crown after the fall of Napoleon in 1815, intended to tow the raft to the Mauritanian coast, just 60 miles away.  However, after a mile or two the raft was abandoned.  Thirteen days later, on 17 July 1816, 15 survivors were rescued by accident when a ship, the Argus, encountered the raft.  No search party had been sent.  The political fallout was obvious and immediate.  Gericault conceived of the first great work of French romanticism, realizing that this was his chance to create an iconic work depicting the failure of those forces that had opposed the Enlightenment in France.  He depicts a scene of abject misery.  The survivors glimpse a ship on the horizon but it is sailing away, in the opposite direction.  Their despair is palpable.  Gericault was influenced by the anatomical depictions of Michaelangelo in fashioning his work but was bitterly disappointed when the French state showed no interest in buying the work possibly because of its reference to an episode that it would have preferred to forget.  Delacroix fashioned his own work The Barque of Dante (1822) after Gericault.  By contrast it was an immediate success, pounced upon by his critics and the public but, once the commotion had died down, purchased by the French state for the Musee du Luxembourg.   Today it hangs in the Musee du Louvre.  It must be said that Delacroix’s work did not have the same level of controversy attached to it and is a work that would decorate a wall rather than incite a rebellion.

ROMANTICISM

Delacroix advertised himself as a self-taught artist emerging from nowhere, formed by unknown elements just as Venus rises from the waves begotten by tempestuous elemental forces.  He was also attracted to exotic, sensual images which he discovered in his fascination with large scale still lives, floral arrangements comprising a classic genre, where he could display his use of colour.  Delacroix always favoured colour, as opposed to careful draughtsmanship or carefully modelled form, especially secondary colours such as purple, orange (Delacroix preferred to use a kind of coral red) and turquoise.  He favoured spontaneity over control and emotion over intellect just as the Romantic era sought to liberate the human spirit from the emphasis placed on intellect, reason and rationality during the Enlightenment era.  For this reason, Romanticism is curiously simultaneously radical and conservative but it seems to be a legitimate reaction to what had gone before.  

Delacroix often sought inspiration in literary models.  He admired Shakespeare, Byron, Goethe, Walter Scott and Ludovico Ariosto author of Orlando Furioso.  Scenes from the work of all of these authors appeared in his painting but he especially liked the works of Byron, the basis for his work The Death of Sardanapulus (1827).  The subject matter is based on Byron's long poem Sardanapulus, the last Assyrian King who stoically committed suicide rather than succumbing to the humiliation of being taken prisoner.  He is apathetic, indifferent in defeat as he orders his concubines and slaves to be slaughtered too.  The painting vividly depicts one of Sardanapulus's concubines whose throat is being slashed in the foreground of the painting.  Parisian audiences were shocked by the painting's literalness but they also found it to be unfocused and confused especially the indifference of the subject to his fate, a typical Romantic trait.  But Delacroix's greatest success came in 1830 with an image that summarised the revolutionary spirit of the period, his work Liberty leading the People.  This surmounts Gericault's summary of the Ancien regime and became the quintessential Romantic image.  It is Delacroix’s use of light in this image that he is most innovative, the source of contrast and highlight as in the floodlit figure of Liberty.

ORIENTALISM

To continue his fascination with the occult, esoteric and exotic Delacroix travelled to Spain and North Africa as part of a diplomatic mission to Morocco which followed French annexation of Algeria.  In North Africa he found a totally different light to that found in grey Paris and he made over 100 painting and sketches during his time there.  His most notable work completed in Morocco was his 1834 painting The Women of Algiers in their Apartment.  The work influenced later painters such as Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919) who completed his own trip to Algeria in 1881 and Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) who completed his homage to Delacroix, a multi-faceted series of works entitled Les Femmes d'Algers (1955).  Delacroix felt the subjects he encountered in Morocco really resembled the people of antiquity, reclining Moroccans seem like Roman senators clad in copious togas and Moroccan women in sublimely Classical poses.  But above all Delacroix’s journeys influenced the French artist Paul Gaugin (1848-1903) who resembled Delacroix in being self-taught and by his voyage to Tahiti where he completed some of his most remarkable work.  Gaugin’s work was also striking but criticised for its technical deficiencies. 

INFLUENCE

Delacroix influenced a disparate group of artists who followed him, for instance his movement towards non-objective, symbolist painting influenced Odilon Redon (1840-1916).  Delacroix’s history paintings also influenced Edgar Degas (1834-1917).  Degas considered history painting to be a vital contemporary art genre.  Incidentally, Delacroix is often considered to be possibly the last of the great religious artists although he was not a committed Christian.

Delacroix also influenced a further offshoot of Impressionism, the Pontillists.  The founder of the movement, George Seurat (1859-1891) and his protégé Paul Signac (1863-1935) believed that Delacroix had initiated the scientific study of colour.  They also admired the fact that Delacroix had liberated his brushwork from academic convention.

Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890) greatly admired Delacroix’s use of colour and his brushwork.  When van Gogh was confined to a mental hospital he requested that his brother Theo send him black and white lithographs of Delacroix’s paintings.  Van Gogh created his brilliant pieta by combining cadmium yellow with Prussian blue, non-naturalist colours but colour combinations that he though Delacroix might have used.

Delacroix continued to influence Post-Impressionists, Expressionists and Fauvists such as Henri Matisse (1869-1954) but also the first abstract artists such as Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944).  Delacroix favoured the aesthetic theory known as Synaesthesia, a philosophical and artistic movement combining all the arts which were all meant to be gravitating towards the condition of music, the ultimate art form since it was entirely abstract.  Contemporary advocates of the theory included the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) and Richard Wagner (1813-1883). 

Paul Murphy, the National Gallery, London