Delacroix's friendship with Thales Fielding and Bonington and his love
of English romantic literature had awakened in him the desire to visit
London. He undertook the little journey in 1825. He was much
impressed by the immensity of London, the "absence of all that we call
architecture," the horses and carriages, the river, Richmond, and
Greenwich; and, above all, by the English stage. He had occasion to
admire the great Kean in some of his Shakespearian impersonations, and
Terry as Mephistopheles in an adaptation of "Faust." He was deeply
stirred by these productions, which had a by no means beneficial
influence upon his art. To his love of the stage may be ascribed the
least acceptable characteristics of his minor pictures and
lithographs--exaggerated action, stage grouping, and a certain lack of
restraint. It is difficult to understand Goethe's highly eulogistic
comment upon Delacroix's "Faust" illustrations, unless it was a case of
_faute de mieux_, or that he had not seen the complete set. To modern
eyes, at any rate, they are the epitome of the master's weaknesses.
The drawing is frequently inexcusably bad; the sentiment is carried
beyond the merely theatrical to the melodramatic.
Next to the stage, he was interested by the works of the contemporary
British artists, with many of whom he entered into personal relations.
In his letters he expressed the keenest admiration not only for
Bonington (with whom he shared a studio in the following year),
Constable, and Turner, whose influence upon the French School he
readily admitted, but also for Lawrence--"the flower of politeness and
truly a painter of princes ... he is inimitable"--and for Wilkie, whose
sketches and studies he declared to be beyond praise, although "he
spoils regularly all the beautiful things he has done" in the process
of finishing the pictures.
Unfortunately the principal work painted by Delacroix in the year after
his return from England, the "Justinian Composing the Institutes," for
the interior of the Conseil d'Etat, perished by fire in 1871. The
Salon was only reopened, after an interval of two years, in 1827, when
Delacroix was represented by no fewer than twelve paintings, including
"The Death of Sardanapalus," "Marino Faliero," and "Christ in the
Garden of Olives." The extreme daring, the tempestuous passionate
disorder of the design of the large "Sardanapalus" alienated from him
even the few enlightened spirits who had espoused his cause on the two
former occasions. The reception of the picture was disastrous.
Delacroix himself admitted that the first sight of his canvas at the
exhibition had given him a severe shock. "I hope," he wrote to a
friend, "that people won't look at it through my eyes." The picture
raised a hurricane of abuse. His own significant dictum that "you
should begin with a broom and finish with a needle," was turned against
him by a critic who spoke of the work of an "intoxicated broom."
Another described him as a "drunken savage," and yet another referred
to the picture as the "composition of a sick man in delirium." His
other pictures were scarcely noticed, although they included a
masterpiece like the "Marino Faliero" (now in the Wallace Collection),
which Delacroix himself held to be one of his finest achievements, and
which certainly rivals the great Venetians in harmonious sumptuousness
of colour. In this picture Delacroix is intensely dramatic without
being theatrical. Nothing could be more impressive than the massing of
light on the empty marble staircase, the grand figure of the
executioner, the statuesque immobility of the nobles assembled at the
head of the staircase. The picture was exhibited in London in 1828,
when it was warmly eulogised, which is the more remarkable as Delacroix
never seemed to appeal strongly to British taste--the scarcity of his
works in our public and private collections may be adduced as proof.
It was on the occasion of this 1827 Salon that the terms "Romanticism"
and "Romanticists" first came into general use. Their exact definition
is not an easy matter. Broadly speaking, the romantic movement in
literature, music, and painting signifies the accentuation of human
emotions and passions in art, as opposed to the classic ideal of purity
of form. Delacroix himself did not wish to be identified with any
group or movement, but in the eyes of the public he stood as the leader
of the Romanticists in painting, just as Victor Hugo, with whom he had
but little sympathy, did in literature.
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