Eugene Delacroix, who was born on the 7th Floreal of the year VI., as
the Republican calendar has it, or the 26th April 1798, according to
our own reckoning, belonged to a distinguished family. His father,
Charles Delacroix, an ardent Republican, who had voted for the death of
his king, took a very active part in the political life of his country,
and filled successively the posts of Minister for Foreign Affairs,
Ambassador to Vienna, Departmental Prefect, and Ambassador to the
Batavian Republic. His mother, Victoire, was the daughter of Boulle's
pupil, the famous cabinetmaker Oeben, and was connected by family links
with the even more illustrious Riesener. His brother, Charles Henri,
achieved fame in the Napoleonic campaigns, was created Baron of the
Empire in 1810, and became Quartermaster-General in 1815. The military
career was also adopted by his other brother Henri, who fell at
Friedland in 1807. His sister married Raymond de Verninac, who became
Prefect of the Rhone and subsequently Ambassador to the Swiss Republic.
Delacroix was not an infant prodigy. He showed none of that
irresistible early impulse towards art which is so often discovered by
posthumous biographers of great masters. Indeed, his inclinations
tended more towards music; and at one time he thought of adopting a
military career. Even when, at the age of seventeen, he left college
to enter Guerin's studio, he was by no means determined to devote
himself exclusively to painting. There was not much sympathy between
master and pupil. The impetuous youth, with his keen sense of the
dramatic and romantic, and his passionate love of music, even if his
emotionalism was held in check by intellectuality, felt repelled by the
icy coldness of the man in whom the teaching of David had stifled any
personal talent he may have possessed. And Delacroix soon found that
he could learn more from copying Rubens, Raphael, and Titian at the
Louvre than from Guerin's dry instruction. Moreover, he had the good
fortune of gaining the friendship of his fellow-student, Gericault,
who, inspired by a spirit akin to that of Delacroix, had already broken
away from the tradition of the School, and who heralded the dawn of a
new era with his intensely dramatic and almost revolutionary "Raft of
the Medusa." Delacroix himself tells in his Journal that he was so
powerfully impressed by the intense realism of his friend's work, that
on leaving the studio he ran through the streets like a madman. How
much he benefited by Gericault's example became clear when his "Dante
and Virgil" appeared at the Salon of 1822, raising its author with a
single bound to fame.
Delacroix's mother died in 1819. His small heritage was swallowed up
by a lawsuit. His position would have been desperate, but for the help
of Gericault, who procured him a commission for an altarpiece for the
Convent of the Ladies of the Sacred Heart at Nantes. There is no trace
of his later Romanticist fire in this altarpiece, and in the "Vierge
des Maisons" for the church of Orcemont, which dates from the same
period. Both pictures are based on the study of Raphael. Among
Delacroix's intimates of these early days was the English painter,
Thales Fielding, from whom he not only acquired his knowledge of the
art of water-colour painting--then scarcely practised in France--but
who awakened or strengthened in him the taste for English literature
and especially for Shakespeare and Byron.
With the "Dante and Virgil" of 1822, Delacroix definitely dissociated
himself from the frigid, lifeless tradition of the David School, of
which Ingres was soon to become the acknowledged leader. "That School
of Ingres," Delacroix once expressed himself on one of those rare
occasions when he broke through his habitual reticence concerning his
critical views on his contemporaries, "wants to make painting a
dependency of the antiquaries; it is pretentious archaeology; these are
not pictures." "Cameos are not made," he wrote on another occasion,
"to be put into painting; everything ought to keep its proper place."
The "Dante and Virgil" was his first pictorial protest against the rule
of cold classicism. To-day we may be surprised that a picture so
balanced in design, so sober in colour, so sculpturally plastic in the
modelling of the human form, could have been considered in any way
revolutionary and should have evoked such violent abuse as was showered
upon it by the Davidists. But turn from this "Dante" to David's "Oath
of the Horatii" and "Leonidas," which may be taken to typify the
artistic standard of the time, and you will grasp the full significance
of Delacroix's bold step. True, Gericault had already followed similar
aims with his "Raft of the Medusa"; but this astounding picture, a
record of a disaster which was then still fresh in the people's memory,
was considered rather as a magnificent piece of pictorial journalism
than as a work to be judged by the canons of the "grand style."
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