Delacroix

2 Pages 446 Words

Delacroix in his youth certainly led a bohemian life. Partisans of the bastard theory, which identifies him as Talleyrand’s son, attribute the brilliant beginning of his career to the powerful hidden protection of his putative father. Delacroix was a cultivated man.
Delacroix painted or drew himself several times during the course of his life, thus bearing witness both to physical changes and to the development of his personality. Representations of Delacroix where he seems somewhat relaxed are rare, whether it is the artist tormented by spleen and melancholy lithographed, or the friend in a hat who amuses himself by posing as a spiritualist during the first daguerreotype session that he participated in 1842, among others, of the humor he always knew how to use and that should be kept in mind. The Massacres of Chios and The Death of Sardanapalus are paradigmatic of Romanticism, Women of Algiers in Their Apartment of Orientalism, and Liberty Leading the People has become a veritable republican icon. One could answer that these canvases aspire to the universal: war, love, death, revolution – such is their real subject. Notwithstanding Liberty Leading the People and the Massacres of Chios, his work is among the least political of the century, or in any cause, except for Greek independence. Delacroix had experienced such exposure from the time of his first exhibition at the age of twenty-four, when the government acquired The Barque of Dante. The important consequence was that the Louvre had no large works of Delacroix except paintings of romantic inspiration and had none that represented the more classical vein characteristic of his development after 1832, both of which circumstances have altered his image. When Eugene Delacroix died he left about nine thousand one hundred forty works, including eight hundred fifty-three paintings; fifteen hundred twenty-five pastels, watercolors, or wash drawings; six thousand six hundred a...