‘The seeds of almost every art movement current in 19th century Paris were sown by artists copying and emulating Delacroix’s work.’
Ferdinand Victor Eugène Delacroix (1798 to 1863) was the leading exponent of Romanticism in French art, active from his first exhibition at the annual Salon de Paris in 1823 through to his last appearance in 1853. He pioneered a colourful, vibrant, spontaneous-feeling approach to depicting historical subjects, scenes from the ‘exotic East’, landscapes, nudes and still lifes.
Self Portrait by Eugène Delacroix (about 1837) Musée du Louvre, Paris © RMN-Grand Palais (musée du Louvre) / Jean-Gilles Berizzi
I thought the title of this exhibition was a bit modish, that the tag ‘…and the rise of modern art’ could be applied to umpteen 19th century painters simply by living before the deluge of Modernism – but in fact the show completely convinces you that Delacroix really was instrumental in the rise of modern art.
It does this by avoiding a straightforwardly chronological survey of his career. Instead the exhibition consists of six rooms, each of which addresses a specific theme or subject – and then hangs Delacroix paintings from the 1830s, 40s and 50s next to works which strikingly resemble them, refer to them or incorporate their techniques, by artists of the next two generations, including Renoir, Monet, Cézanne, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Matisse and Kandinsky, along with the lesser-known Symbolist artists, Gustave Moreau and Odilon Redon.
What the exhibition makes clear is that later artists didn’t just copy or learn from Delacroix in subtle and obscure ways, visible only to scholars and experts. They paid direct homage to him, copying his subjects and compositions and styles and ideas in ways which are immediately visible to even an untrained eye. They wrote letters, commentaries, essays and articles explicitly acknowledging their debt to him, and even made paintings showing him being levitated to heaven or showered with awards by a grateful posterity. As Cézanne, a really devout follower, said: ‘We all paint in Delacroix’s language’.
Apotheosis of Delacroix by Paul Cézanne (1890 to 1894) © RMN-Grand Palais (Musée d’Orsay) / Hervé Lewandowski
After Delacroix’s death the contents of his studio were sold off and revealed a wealth of previously unknown outdoors paintings, which had a strong impact on the young Impressionists who were just starting out on their careers. They found in Delacroix a liberation from the official Salon art of the day, the inspiration to capture the warmth and vibrancy of the everyday, the exotic, the exciting, instead of the glacial cool of the perfectly poised subjects concocted in the artist’s studio.
When a later generation wanted to move beyond Impressionism in the 1890s, Delacroix’s sometimes blurry use of paint pointed the way for Symbolist painters seeking misty, portentous shapes and mythological images – but also provided inspiration for the Post-Impressionists (Gauguin, van Gogh) who were interested in bold experiments with colour for its own sake.
Still Life with a Sketch after Delacroix by Paul Gauguin (1887) Musée d’Art moderne et contemporain de Strasbourg © Photo Musées de Strasbourg, M. Bertola
And when his collected writings on art, painting technique and broader aesthetics were published in three volumes between 1893 and 1895, the depth and variety of ideas contained in their 1,438 pages crystallised Delacroix’s position as a key thinker, who could be plundered by all the various schools of modern art.
Rough not smooth
As his Wikipedia entry makes clear:
In contrast to the Neoclassical perfectionism of his chief rival Ingres, Delacroix took for his inspiration the art of Rubens and painters of the Venetian Renaissance, with an attendant emphasis on colour and movement rather than clarity of outline and carefully modelled form.
Rather than smooth perfection, Delacroix developed a technique of painting au premier coup, trying to complete a work in one sitting, or over a few days at most. This makes a lot of his paintings quite rough to look at – in fact not that many of the Delacroixs on show here are, in themselves, that appealing.
The Death of Sardanapalus (reduced replica) by Eugène Delacroix (1846) © Philadelphia Museum of Art, Pennsylvania
The above is a small-scale copy of the large original. The exhibition juxtaposes it with the The Eternal Feminine by Cézanne, pointing out the way that both works feature a still figure on a bed regarding the mayhem of activity around them.
The Eternal Feminine by Paul Cézanne (about 1877) © The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Close up
Some paintings are best viewed from a distance, like a lot of the Impressionist works at the Inventing Impressionism show hanging in these very rooms a year ago. But if I learned one thing about Delacroix’s paintings it is that they are best looked at very close up. At medium distance often the composition looks a bit shabby, the figures not too convincing and the background sketched in. But really close up – a foot from the canvas – you can see the confidence of the quick, flicking brushstrokes.
Thus the poster for the show is a big close-up of a lion’s head, its glaring eye set among a mesh of bold strokes. But when you see the source work you realise the lion’s head is only about two inches square – tiny – and the overall impression a bit murky, the composition of the bodies very staged, the landscape in the background looking like waves.
Lion Hunt by Eugène Delacroix (1861) © The Art Institute of Chicago
Unless you go close. Close up you can see and enjoy the flicks and flecks of the brush which create the overall image.
Detail from Lion Hunt by Eugène Delacroix (1861) © The Art Institute of Chicago
Once I’d grasped this was the best way to enjoy Delacroix’s paintings, I spent more and more time with my nose a foot from the surface, marvelling at the dexterity and energy of the quick confident brushstrokes, in a way more entranced by them than by the ostensible subject matter. And looking at them this closely also helps you to understand why later painters found his approach so liberating: you can see the freedom of the way he paints echoed or repeated in Renoir, Cézanne and many others. There’s a particularly direct line from the Delacroix flecks and flicks of paint to van Gogh’s striking use of strong, well-defined, directional brushstrokes in bold un-naturalistic colours, having taken Delacroix’s example and turned it into a whole style.
Pietà (after Delacroix) by Vincent van Gogh (1889) © Van Gogh Museum
Comparisons
So throughout the exhibition, we are invited to compare and contrast numerous originals by Delacroix with works by later artists which directly or indirectly pay homage or rework his themes, subjects or handling: especially the rough improvised handling of the paint, and the use of bright and unexpected colour.
- Christ on the Sea of Galilee by Delacroix (1853) with its Italian reds and aquamarines, with The Red Barque by Odilon Redon (about 1895)
- Delacroix’s full length portrait of Louis-Auguste Schwiter (1826 to 1830) with a haughty, supreme John Singer Sargent portrait of Lord Ribblesdale (1902)
Compare Delacroix’s treatment of a classical Greek myth – the shaping of the figures, above all the amazing bursts of orange and yellow at the heart of it…
Apollo Slaying Python, Preliminary Sketch by Eugène Delacroix (1850) © Van Gogh Museum
…with the treatment of a similar subject done 45 years later by the Symbolist painter, Odilon Redon.
Pegasus and the hydra by Odilon Redon (after 1900) © Collection Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo. Photo Rik Klein Gotink
The not very good, characteristically rushed Ovid among the Scythians (1862) is hung next to similar compositions by, among others, Degas: Alexander and Bucephalus (1862), and Young Spartans Exercising (1860).
Delacroix’s Bathers of 1854 is compared with a series of later depictions of the same subject…
Bathers by Eugène Delacroix (1854) © Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, Connecticut
… including Cezanne’s Battle of Love.
The Battle of Love by Paul Cézanne (about 1880) Courtesy of the Board of Trustees, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC
To reiterate, it’s not the brilliance of the finished compositions which are important – it’s the freedom of those swiftly administered flecking brushstrokes, and the bold use of colour, which later painters dwelt on.
Flowers
One particular Delacroix quote crops up several times in the wall panels – ‘The primary merit of a painting is to be a feast for the eye’ – and this seems particularly appropriate to the room devoted to paintings of flowers, a modest but vibrant genre which Delacroix is credited with bringing back into fashion.
In this room hang just seven paintings and we can play the exhibition game of comparing a Delacroix from the early century with a selection of gorgeous paintings by his inheritors, including Gauguin, van Gogh and Redilon. Here’s a Delacroix flower painting:
A Basket of Fruit in a Flower Garden by Eugène Delacroix (1848 to 1849) © Philadelphia Museum of Art, Pennsylvania. John G. Johnson Collection, 1917 (1917,974)
Compare and contrast with:
- The Trellis, or Young Woman arranging Flowers (1862) by Gustave Courbet
- The wonderful Still life with meadow flowers (1886) by Van Gogh
- A Gauguin:
A Vase of Flowers by Paul Gauguin (1896) © The National Gallery, London
And my favourite, Ophelia among the flowers by Odilon Redon. This is done with pastel on canvas and, close up, you can see how the crayon effect creates the misty washes of colour across the canvas, which add to the sense of mysteriousness but also to the sense of colour creating shapes from its own logic.
Ophelia among the Flowers by Odilon Redon (about 1905 to 1908) © The National Gallery, London
Throughout the show, in the rooms devoted to landscapes, or his trip to North Africa, or music and aesthetics, there are many, many more beautiful paintings, including masterpieces by Gauguin and van Gogh and Monet and Cézanne and Signac and Matisse, a wonderful array of colour and composition which, one by one and systematically, not only validate the curator’s argument for the massive influence of Delacroix on later generations of artists, but are also objects of joy and wonder in their own right.
The Mural Projects
Most of the paintings in the exhibition are on the small side, the exception which proves the rule being the two life-size full length portraits by Delacroix and John Singer Sargent which I mentioned at the start.
The main surprise of the show is the revelation that Delacroix also created a range of enormous murals as public commissions, wall and ceiling paintings as big as Michelangelo’s in the Sistine Chapel. They obviously can’t be packed up and shipped along to these exhibition rooms in London and so we learn about them in a dark room off to the side of the exhibition, in which a high quality US-made video is projected onto an enormous screen to show the vast panoramas Delacroix created for:
- The Salon du Roi
- The Library of the Deputy of Chambers
- the Galère d’Apollon
- The Chapel of Holy Angels, in the church of Saint-Sulpice
Conclusion
This is a lovely exhibition, which both proves its point and is also a sumptuous visual feast. At 63 paintings it is on the small side, which is all the better because it gives you time to really soak up some of the masterpieces on display.
The final painting is a direct tribute to Delacroix by Fantin-Latour, celebrating the unveiling of a monument to Delacroix in the Luxembourg Gardens. Delacroix’s name is just about visible in capitals at the bottom left, the skyline of Paris visible in the bottom right, but the dominant figure is the kindly goddess of Posterity sprinkling flowers – made doubly significant, as we have seen, because of the achievement of Delacroix’s own flower paintings – to immortalise his name.
Immortality by Ignace-Henri-Théodore Fantin-Latour (1889) © Amgueddfa Cymru – National Museum Wales
Related links
- Delacroix and the Rise of Modern Art continues at the National Gallery until 22 May 2016
- Delacroix: And the Rise of Modern Art (catalogue of the show)
- Delacroix and the Rise of Modern Art (CD of music from Delacroix’s era)
- Video explaining Delacroix’s use of colour
- Delacroix Wikipedia article
Books & Boots 