Eugène Delacroix was one of the greatest painters of French Romanticism. The themes of his paintings are politics, the lure of the exotic and the telling of myth.
He is considered a true master in the use of colour, employed to bring out the movement and drama of the scene. Delacroix’s works are made of intense, nervous brushstrokes, designed to highlight the figures and their whirling actions.
You may not know it, but Delacroix’s style rests on a critical, attentive study. At its heart is the juxtaposition of tones according to the theory of contrast: pure primary colours and their complementaries, to obtain a strong contrast between light and shadow. An art far removed from that of Ingres, his great rival, still tied to neoclassicism and to the pursuit of the perfect outline.
Do you want to look more closely at Delacroix’s art, his ideas and his incredible life? Let’s go!
Who was Eugène Delacroix: childhood and training
Eugène Delacroix was born on 26 April 1798 at Charenton-Saint-Maurice, just outside Paris. His mother, Victoire Oeben, was the daughter of the famous court cabinetmaker Jean-François Oeben, and had married Charles-François Delacroix, a lawyer with an important political career: he had been Minister of Foreign Affairs during the Directory.
There is, however, a little mystery that still fascinates historians. Many believe that Eugène’s real father was Talleyrand, the great diplomat and family friend who succeeded Charles-François at Foreign Affairs: he resembled him in looks and character, and throughout the painter’s life he protected his career with discreet commissions. An anecdote that, true or not, says a great deal about the world Delacroix grew up in.
Despite the family’s comfortable standing, his childhood was not easy: he lost his father when he was only seven, and shortly afterwards the family moved to Paris, where he attended the prestigious imperial lycée (today’s Louis-le-Grand). When his mother died, when he was sixteen, he found himself in financial difficulty.
In 1815, thanks to his uncle Henri-François Riesener, he entered the studio of the painter Pierre-Narcisse Guérin, a figure of neoclassicism. But his real school was the Louvre, where he tirelessly copied the masterpieces of the past: the painters who influenced him most were above all Michelangelo, Raphael, Titian and Rubens.
It was in Guérin’s studio that the decisive encounter of his life took place: the one with Théodore Géricault, seven years his senior. Delacroix was so struck by the Raft of the Medusa that he posed for one of the figures and later paid homage to the work with The Barque of Dante (1822). He wrote about that painting:
“Géricault allowed me to see his Raft of the Medusa while he was still working on it. It made a tremendous impression on me: when I left his studio I started running like a madman and did not stop until I reached my own room.”
The journey to Morocco and the lure of the East
One of the most formative experiences for his painting was the journey to North Africa in 1832. Delacroix joined the diplomatic mission of Count Charles de Mornay, sent by Louis-Philippe to the Sultan of Morocco, and landed in Tangier in January of that year. He was dazzled by the light, the colours and the cultures he encountered, and filled dozens of notebooks with sketches and watercolours.
On the way back, in Algiers, he managed by luck to enter a harem thanks to a merchant: from those studies came, a few years later, one of his most famous paintings, Women of Algiers in Their Apartment (1834). After that journey his palette became even brighter, and his passion for the East, already fed by his vast literary culture, never left him.
The works and the recognition
For his first public commissions Delacroix painted some religious canvases, such as the Virgin of the Harvest for the church of Orcemont and the Virgin of the Sacred Heart destined for Nantes cathedral.
But it was with The Barque of Dante that he was admitted for the first time to the Paris Salon, in 1822: the work caused a stir and divided the critics, yet it was bought by the French State and is now in the Louvre.
A few years later, in 1824, he exhibited the Scenes from the Massacre of Chios, dedicated to the slaughter carried out by the Ottomans during the Greek War of Independence: a work that earned him the label of “the massacre of painting”, but that marked a turning point. It has long been said that Delacroix reworked its background after seeing the luminous landscapes of the Englishman John Constable, exhibited in Paris in that very year of 1824; a recent restoration (2019-2020) has, however, cast doubt on these late retouches. What is certain is that Constable struck him: “Constable does me a great deal of good,” he noted during a stay in England.
His true masterpiece, though, is another. I’ll talk about it below.
Liberty Leading the People
Liberty Leading the People was painted in the autumn of 1830, inspired by the revolutionary uprisings of that year, when Parisians rose up against the authoritarian policies of Charles X of Bourbon. During the “three glorious days” of 27-29 July, the city filled with barricades and forced the king to abdicate.
At the centre of the scene, a woman advances, urging on the crowd and waving the tricolour: she is the allegory of Liberty (often identified with Marianne). She bares her breast, wears the Phrygian cap, symbol of the 1789 revolution, and holds the French flag in one hand and a bayoneted musket in the other. Around her are all the social classes: the boy with pistols (who inspired Hugo’s Gavroche in Les Misérables), the worker, the top-hatted bourgeois.
Compositionally the work is clearly inspired by his friend Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa: the same pyramidal structure, the same drama of the bodies in the foreground, down to the detail of the foot with the half-slipped stocking. It is no coincidence that, at the Louvre, the two canvases are displayed close to each other.
There is a little-known twist, though: the painting was bought by the State in 1831, but judged too revolutionary and soon hidden away in a storeroom. It entered the Louvre for good only in 1874, under the Third Republic. Today it is one of the most famous paintings in the world.
Friendships and cultural context
Delacroix was always surrounded by great artists and influential figures. Besides his friend Géricault, he was a regular among the Romantic poets, including Victor Hugo, Stendhal and Alexandre Dumas. A lover of literature, he studied Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe and above all Byron in depth, drawing from one of his poems the inspiration for the sumptuous, violent Death of Sardanapalus (1827).
In his mature years he grew close to classical music, striking up a friendship with Frédéric Chopin and with the writer George Sand (pen name of Amantine Dupin). Of the composer he left us a famous portrait, now in the Louvre.
Delacroix’s maturity and death
As often happens in art, the most prestigious recognition came late, with great cycles of mural decorations: the library of the Palais Bourbon (the Chamber) and that of the Palais du Luxembourg (the Senate), the ceiling of the Galerie d’Apollon at the Louvre (1851, with Apollo Slaying the Python) and the Salon de la Paix of the Paris Hôtel de Ville, this last sadly destroyed in the fire of 1871.
His final great masterpiece was the decoration of the Chapel of the Holy Angels at Saint-Sulpice (with Jacob Wrestling with the Angel), on which he worked as long as his strength allowed. Worn out by fatigue and illness, he never stopped painting until his death, in Paris on 13 August 1863. In his studio hundreds of paintings and thousands of drawings were found.
Despite his success, Delacroix lived almost in solitude and never married. His influence on later generations, from the Impressionists to Van Gogh and Cézanne, was enormous, precisely because of his style and his revolutionary use of colour. Today his grave is in the Père-Lachaise cemetery in Paris, like that of his friend Géricault.
Where to see the works of Delacroix
As one of the leading French painters, his finest canvases are almost all in Paris:
- the Louvre holds his absolute masterpieces: Liberty Leading the People, The Barque of Dante, the Women of Algiers, the portrait of Chopin and the ceiling of the Galerie d’Apollon;
- the small Musée national Eugène-Delacroix, set up in his last studio on place de Furstenberg (in Saint-Germain-des-Prés), is today annexed to the Louvre and can be visited with the same ticket;
- his great mural decorations are in the church of Saint-Sulpice (the Chapel of the Holy Angels), in the Palais Bourbon and in the Palais du Luxembourg;
- outside France you can find him at the Metropolitan in New York, the National Gallery in London and many other great museums.
If you’re in Paris and want to discover Delacroix’s works in person, the advice is to book the skip-the-line ticket for the Louvre: you avoid the endless queues at the pyramid (the same ticket also gives you access to the Musée Delacroix) and can devote more time to the visit.
And you, standing before Liberty Leading the People, what do you see: a political manifesto, or a hymn to the art that knows how to tell history?
