Tuesday, August 30, 2016

Painted Romanticism by Eugène Delacroix

Eugène Delacroix
Mademoiselle Rose
ca. 1820
oil on canvas
Louvre

Eugène Delacroix
Barque of Dante
1822
oil on canvas
Louvre

Quotations below are translated excerpts from Delacroix's journals and letters 

"There is no merit in being truthful when one is truthful by nature, or rather when one can be nothing else; it is a gift, like poetry or music. But it needs courage to be truthful after carefully considering the matter, unless a kind of pride is involved; for example, the man who says to himself, "I am ugly," and then says, "I am ugly" to his friends, lest they should think themselves the first to make the discovery."

Eugène Delacroix
Greece on the ruins of Missolonghi
1826
oil on canvas
Musée des Beaux-Arts, Bordeaux

Eugène Delacroix
Still life with lobster
1826-27
oil on canvas
Louvre

"I believe it safe to say that all progress must lead, not to further progress, but finally to the negation of progress, a return to the point of departure."

Eugène Delacroix
Execution of Doge Marino Faliero
1826-27
oil on canvas
Wallace Collection, London

Eugène Delacroix
Woman with a parrot
1827
oil on canvas
Musée des Beaux-Arts, Lyon

Eugène Delacroix
Liberty leading the people
1830
oil on canvas
Louvre

"They say that each generation inherits from those that have gone before; if this were so there would be no limit to man's improvements or to his power of reaching perfection. But he is very far from receiving intact that storehouse of knowledge which the centuries have piled up before him; he may perfect some inventions, but in others, he lags behind the originators, and a great many inventions have been lost entirely. What he gains on the one hand, he loses on the other."

Eugène Delacroix
Justice (detail of mural)
1833-37
oil & wax on plaster
Salon du Roi, Palais Bourbon, Paris

Eugène Delacroix
Justice (detail of mural)
1833-37
oil & wax on plaster
Salon du Roi, Palais Bourbon, Paris

Eugène Delacroix
War (detail of mural)
1833-37
oil & wax on plaster
Salon du Roi, Palais Bourbon, Paris

Eugène Delacroix
Cleopatra with a peasant delivering a serpent
1838
oil on canvas
Ackland Art Museum, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

Eugène Delacroix
Sketch for Peace Descends to Earth
1852
oil on canvas
Musée de Petit Palais, Paris

"... art is no longer what the vulgar think it to be, that is, some sort of inspiration which comes from nowhere, which proceeds by chance, and presents no more than the picturesque externals of things. It is reason itself, adorned by genius, but following a necessary course and encompassed by higher laws."

Eugène Delacroix
Lion hunt in Morocco
1854
oil on canvas
Hermitage

In Morocco, Delacroix felt that he had discovered "men who were more men than us." He concluded that "... to paint such men, it is necessary to take on the greatest difficulty, which consists in moving at every instant from an admiring style to an informal style that lends itself to painting grotesque scenes. You must, so to speak, change pens all the time. You see the most imposing and the most ridiculous things pass before your eyes without transition."   

Eugène Delacroix
Jaguar attacking a horse
ca. 1855
oil on canvas
Národní Galerie, Prague

"Michelangelo did not know a single one of the feelings of man, not one of his passions. When he was making an arm or a leg, it seems as if he were thinking only of that arm or leg and was not giving the slightest consideration to the way it relates with the action of the figure to which it belongs, much less to the action of the picture as a whole. Therein lies his great merit - he brings a sense of the grand and the terrible into even an isolated limb."