Eugène Delacroix

Style and technique

Delacroix believed that colour was a force, not a decoration. In a period when French academic painting subordinated colour entirely to drawing, he argued — in practice, in his journal, and in the long debates with critics — that the interaction of colours in a painting created its own kind of meaning, independent of subject or form. A crimson next to a cold blue does something to the eye that no formal composition achieves. He spent thirty years working out the consequences.

His journal is one of the greatest documents in the history of painting — a daily record of observations, theories, complaints, and insights that he kept from 1822 until the year of his death. In it he wrote about the effect of light on shadows, about the way complementary colours intensify each other, about what Rubens did with the flesh of his figures that no one since had managed. He studied colour the way a scientist studies light.

This was not merely technique but philosophy. The visible brushstroke meant that the painting was alive, that it had been made by a human hand in real time, that the act of painting was as real as the thing depicted. The Impressionists — Monet, Renoir, Pissarro — understood this immediately and credited Delacroix as their ancestor.

His subjects were chosen for maximum emotional intensity: massacres, battles, animal hunts, burning cities, scenes from Dante, Byron, Shakespeare, and the Arabic world he observed directly in Morocco in 1832. He went to North Africa on a diplomatic mission and filled seven notebooks with drawings and watercolours of markets, harems, horses, and wrestlers — material that fed his work for the rest of his career.

Four fingerprints identify his work: diagonal compositions that suggest movement, complex multi-figure tangles that read as a single mass, rich, deep colour with unexpected chromatic juxtapositions, and animals used as symbols of wild energy — his hunts and battles almost always involve horses or lions at the peak of their violence.

Life and legacy

Delacroix was born on 26 April 1798 in Charenton-Saint-Maurice, near Paris. His legal father was Charles-François Delacroix, a prefect and diplomat; his likely biological father — according to persistent rumour supported by circumstantial evidence — was the statesman Charles de Talleyrand, who remained a distant but attentive presence throughout his early career. The question has never been definitively settled.

He entered the studio of Pierre-Narcisse Guérin in 1815 and encountered there both Géricault, four years his senior, and the works of Rubens and Veronese that would shape his entire aesthetic. He saw Géricault's 'Raft of the Medusa' in progress in 1818 and understood immediately what emotional scale in painting looked like.

His first Salon submission, 'The Barque of Dante' (1822), was purchased by the French state and launched his reputation. 'The Massacre at Chios' appeared at the Salon of 1824, the same year as Ingres's 'Vow of Louis XIII', and the contrast was deliberate and conscious: two incompatible ideas of painting, offered for public judgment simultaneously. The rivalry was launched.

'Liberty Leading the People' appeared at the Salon of 1831, painted in the wake of the July Revolution of 1830. Delacroix was not himself a revolutionary — he was bourgeois, conservative, and somewhat alarmed by the events he was depicting — but he was moved by them, and the painting is the greatest single political image in the history of French art. Liberty, a bare-breasted woman in a Phrygian cap, strides across the barricades carrying the tricolour flag and a musket. The dead of both sides lie at her feet. Paris burns in the background.

In 1832 he went to Morocco with a French diplomatic mission, and the journey transformed him. He found in North Africa a living antiquity — the people, the horses, the costumes and architecture resembled his idea of ancient Greece more closely than anything in modern France. His Moroccan notebooks, now in the Louvre, are some of the most beautiful drawings of the nineteenth century.

He never married, kept his private life private, and maintained a long association with the soprano Marie-Élisabeth Boulanger and later with his housekeeper Joséphine. He died on 13 August 1863 in Paris, aged sixty-five, of a lung condition. His studio contents were sold at auction and quickly dispersed; the Journal, first published in 1893, established his retrospective reputation as one of the great artistic intellects of the century.

Five famous paintings

Liberty Leading the People 1830

France's most famous political painting, shown at the Salon of 1831 and purchased immediately by the state. Delacroix shows the July Revolution as an allegorical procession: Liberty, a real woman rather than a classical goddess, strides over the bodies of the fallen with the tricolour raised in one hand and a musket in the other. Her companions are a bourgeois gentleman in a top hat (possibly a self-portrait), a street boy with pistols, a wounded worker. The smoky blue-grey background, the diagonal composition, and the extraordinary rendering of the tricolour against the smoke are calculated precisely to produce overwhelming emotion. It hangs in the Louvre.

The Barque of Dante 1822

Delacroix's Salon debut, painted at twenty-three. From Dante's Inferno: Dante and Virgil cross the river Styx in a small boat guided by the figure of Phlegyas, while the damned claw at the hull from the water. The influence of Géricault's 'Raft of the Medusa' (completed three years earlier) is visible in the scale of the figures and the darkness of the atmosphere, but Delacroix's colour is already his own — richer, warmer, more turbulent. Géricault, who saw the painting at the Salon, praised it publicly. The French state bought it. It hangs in the Louvre.

The Massacre at Chios 1824

The Greek War of Independence, which produced strong Romantic sympathy across Europe, provided the subject: a group of Greek civilians — wounded, dying, dead, and despairing — are shown in the foreground while Turkish soldiers and burning villages occupy the middle and far distance. It was described by contemporary critics as 'a massacre of painting' as well as of people, a complaint about Delacroix's loose brushwork and his refusal to idealise the suffering. When he saw Constable's 'Haywain' at the same Salon, he reportedly repainted large sections of his background to add chromatic richness. It hangs in the Louvre.

Women of Algiers in their Apartment 1834

The direct fruit of his 1832 Moroccan journey — though the scene is specifically in Algiers, where he was shown the interior of a harem by a harbour official who gave him access for a few hours. The resulting painting is the most technically complex of his career: four women in a low-lit interior, their silk garments rendered in tones of crimson, green, pale gold, and white, the air heavy with incense and idleness. The colour relationship — specifically the way the warm tones of flesh and fabric interact with the cooler blues and greens — is what Cézanne and Renoir later identified as the key lesson of Delacroix. It hangs in the Louvre.

Jacob Wrestling with the Angel 1861

A mural in the Chapel of the Holy Angels at the church of Saint-Sulpice in Paris, completed between 1855 and 1861 — one of the last great decorative commissions of his career. Jacob and the Angel grapple in a forest clearing, their bodies locked together in a struggle that is simultaneously physical and metaphysical. The forest around them is a brilliant, specific green that was radical for church decoration. The angel is calm; Jacob is exhausted. Delacroix described the struggle in his notes as an image of all human striving against the divine. He worked on the chapel murals for six years, interrupted repeatedly by illness, and completed them two years before his death.