Delacroix, (Ferdinand Victor) Eugène (1798-1863)

This self-portrait by the French Romantic artist Eugène Delacroix (1798-1863) gives a good example of the painter's use of dramatic lighting and of his expressive use of rich fabrics in his work. After his visit to North Africa in 1832, Delacroix used these effects in many of his later paintings.

Constantinople Captured by Crusaders, painted by the French Romantic painter Eugène Delacroix in 1841. Delacroix frequently turned to heroic subjects. In 1830 he took part in the revolution in Paris, France, against the monarchy, and another of his paintings, Liberty Leading the People, records this dramatic event in his life.

French Romantic painter. His prolific output included religious and historical subjects and portraits of friends, among them the musicians Paganini and Chopin. Antagonistic to the French academic tradition, he evolved a highly coloured, fluid style, as in The Death of Sardanapalus (1829; Louvre, Paris).

The Massacre at Chios 1824 (Louvre, Paris) shows Greeks enslaved by wild Turkish horsemen, a contemporary atrocity (his use of a contemporary theme recalls Géricault's example). His style was influenced by the English landscape painter Constable.

Delacroix also produced illustrations for works by Shakespeare, Dante, and Byron. His Journal is a fascinating record of his times.

Viewing Géricault's Raft of the Medusa, 1819, was one of Delacroix's formative early experiences. His own first Salon success, The Barque of Dante, 1822 (Louvre), while showing his devotion to Rubens, was already intensely individual and full of that ‘fever’ which he considered the truly creative atmosphere of art. It was followed 1824 by his masterpiece, The Massacre at Scio (a theme inspired by the Greek struggle for independence). The contrast between martial figures and suffering civilians was derived from Gros's Plague Victims at Jaffa; the colour technique owed something to Constable's Haywain, which Delacroix saw at the Salon and which led him to some repainting. It was at this time that the term Romanticism first came into use in France, and Delacroix was hailed as leader of the movement, though he himself regarded such terms with deep mistrust. Yet his visit to England 1825 (prompted by his friendship with Bonington, and the example of Géricault) certainly involved him in the Romantic subject matter of poetry and the theatre. Byron's tragedy inspired the gorgeous Sardanapalus, 1827 (Louvre); a performance of Faust in London, the Faust lithographs of 1828; and he even pictured himself as Hamlet. While an admirer of classic order, as in Racine or Mozart, nevertheless he sought all means of extending the emotional experience and sensation given by painting. In this respect a new phase began when he visited Spain and Morocco 1832, the result being a new richness of colour and freedom of painting seen in such works as Women of Algiers, 1834 (Louvre). He had the opportunity 1833-56 of decorating buildings on a vast scale: the Chamber of Deputies in the Palais Bourbon, the Senate Library in the Luxembourg, the ceiling of the Galerie d'Apollon, Louvre, the Chapel of the Saints Anges in the Church of St Sulpice. Except in the Louvre (the best of these works) the execution was entrusted to assistants and the imaginative power of the decorations was neutralized by dull colour and inferior workmanship. His temperament was more suited to the individualistic picture, and his studies (produced in the intervals of decorative labour) of exotic or oriental life, of the ferocity and energy of wild animals, or of the richness of flowers such as he painted at his country house at Champrosay, seem more truly expressive. A man of cultivated intelligence and remarkable character (so well described by Baudelaire), he has left in his Journals both shrewd comments on his contemporaries and an impassioned testimony to his own love of all the arts.