Delacroix

By Barthelemy Jobert

Book Overview

Responding to resurgent interest in nineteenth-century French painting--with its rich connections to revolutionary politics, exoticism, romance, and nationalism--Barth l my Jobert offers this long-awaited, first comprehensive book on one of the period's greatest and most elusive artists: Eugtne Delacroix (1798-1863). This solitary genius produced stormy, romantic works like The Death of Sardanapalus and then turned to more classically inspired paintings, such as Liberty Leading the People --a fact that has never been fully explained. In this visually compelling tribute to the artist, however, Jobert explores the driving inner tensions and contradictions behind both Delacroix's life and work. Jobert not only re-creates the political and cultural arenas in which Delacroix thrived, but also allows readers a rare opportunity to appreciate the full range of his artistic production. Delacroix's large canvases, decorative cycles, watercolors, and engravings, which are widely dispersed throughout the world, are beautifully represented here in 231 color plates. The book is timed to commemorate the bicentenary of Delacroix's birth. Traditionally described as an artistic loner, Delacroix profoundly influenced later painters such as C zanne and Picasso. An image of the artist as a man of his times comes to light, however, as Jobert reveals the ways in which Delacroix successfully navigated a career within the Salon system and through government commissions. Delacroix socialized with George Sand and Victor Hugo, engaged Baudelaire and Gauthier in intense philosophical discussions about art, and maintained a lively interaction with the press. As a passionate artist who sought to make money in a politically volatile climate, Delacroix managed to create works that transcended the ideology of his government connections. Delacroix's famous trip to Morocco, which had the ironic outcome of directing his attention away from Romanticism and back toward his classical roots, is analyzed in detail. Considering both Delacroix's training and sources of inspiration, Jobert shows how the Moroccan journey led the artist to a balanced approach to his art: the classical tradition he had never totally abandoned was permanently combined with the Romanticism of his youth. Over the long span of his career, Delacroix responded to the literary fascination with Orientalism, the politics of the Restoration and French imperialism, and popular interest in travel and documentation. He painted everything from sweeping epic tales to intimate interiors. Only now has the scope and scale of Delacroix's oeuvre come to life in a detailed and up-to-date account for the specialist and general reader alike.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0691004188
• ISBN13: 9780691004181
• Release Date: September 1998
• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Length: 336 Pages
• Weight: 1.58 lbs.
• Dimensions: 11.8" x 1.3" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

The fellowship of the colors

We are lucky that so much of DELACROIX's art is still around, lightly spread throughout the world: the only lost works are "Cardinal Richelieu saying mass" during the sack of the Palais Royal in 1848, the decoration of the Salon de la Paix at the Paris Hotel de Ville during the Commune, and "Justinian drafting his laws" during the fire at the Conseil d'Etat in the Palais d'Orsay in 1871. Taken in by anything new that the paint suppliers were selling, DELACROIX made bad choices in canvas and paints: the Romantic "Battle of Nancy," the Classical "Boissy d'Anglas at the National Convention," and the exotic "Moroccan chieftain receiving tribute" suffered from using bitumen, just as "Barque of Dante" has from going over fresh spots. Yet he thought of painting as storytelling with the richly vigorous colors of Peter Paul Rubens and of Paolo Veronese's "St Barnabas healing the sick." He was the only great Western artist to leave masses of manuscripts, as journals, letters and published articles, so we can walk our way through his sketches and writings to the finished products of the master colorist of people, landscapes, buildings, and animals: "Louis-Auguste Schwiter" standing, as his only full-length portrait, inspired by Thomas Gainsborough and Joshua Reynolds; "Charles de Verninac," in two Thomas Lawrence-style expressive bust portraits, with a carefully worked face, large brushstrokes, sketchy background clothes, and subtly agreeing colors; and his last, "Alfred Bruyas," with a Hamlet-like head melancholic, meditative and languid in a harmony of greens, browns and blacks. He was also a master landscapist of few painted landscapes, such as "Banks of the river Sebou," his only salon-shown landscape; "Sea at Dieppe," Impressionist in subject and technique; and "Still life with lobsters," with John Constable-type smooth varnish obviously brushstroked and with a David Wilkie-type lobster right out of "Chelsea prisoners reading the gazette of the battle of Waterloo." But most of his landscapes backgrounded his historytellings, such as "Natchez" and "Ovid among the Scythians": his history style of adding expressiveness and framing scenes was Richard Parkes Bonington-like in being more entertaining and picturesque than heroic, such as in "Henri III at the deathbed of his favorite mistress, Marie de Cleves" and with "Henri IV courting Gabrielle d'Estrees" and in seeming neartransparent watercolor-like by varnish made with copal, such as in the richly colored "Charles VI and Odette de Champdivers" and "Louis d'Orleans showing his mistress Odette de Champdivers." His building decorations harmonized balanced colors with finely drafted figures while getting architecture, light and paint to work together: at the Palais du Luxembourg's cupola harmonious light and vigorous colors dealt with the architecture by background landscape in blues and greens, central sky cloud-filled, and figures fleshtoned against bright reds, blues, greens, ochers, oranges, and whites;