(In the Louvre)
This small panel, which forms part of the Thomas Thiery bequest to the
Louvre, is a picture of precious quality and soft colouring, painted
for his friend, Mme. de Forget, who had exercised her influence in
official quarters when Delacroix endeavoured to obtain the post of
director of the Gobelins manufactory. It was painted in 1848. There
are numerous replicas in existence.
[Illustration: PLATE IV.--THE CRUCIFIXION]
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Delacroix's "Sardanapalus" led to humiliations that he felt more keenly
than the abuse showered upon him by the Press. He was sent for by
Sosthene de la Rochefoucauld, then Director of the Beaux-Arts, to be
advised in all seriousness to study drawing from casts of the antique,
and to change his style if he had any aspirations to official
encouragement. The threat had no effect upon a man of Delacroix's
strength of conviction. He yielded never an inch. He continued to
follow the promptings of his artistic conscience which permitted no
concessions, no compromise. During the very next year, in spite of De
la Rochefoucauld's threat, the State commissioned from him the painting
of "The Death of Charles the Bold at the Battle of Nancy" (now at the
Nancy Museum). The picture was not finished and exhibited before 1834,
when this magnificently conceived scene of wild conflict under a
threatening winter sky--so different from the grandiloquous style of
the painters of the Napoleonic epopee--met with the usual chorus of
disapprobation for being historically incorrect, "as bad as could be in
drawing," "incredibly dirty in colour"--the horses bad as regards
anatomy, the sky impossible!
Although Delacroix was too completely absorbed in his art, which--his
one great passion--took up his entire life, to take any active part in
politics, he was deeply stirred by the events of the July Revolution of
1830. "The 28th July 1830," or "The Barricade," one of the nine works
by which he was represented at the Salon of 1831, was an unmistakable
confession of his political faith. Here, for once, Delacroix found his
moving drama not in romance or in the history of the past, nor in the
picturesque East which, owing to its comparative remoteness and
inaccessibility at a time that did not enjoy the prosaic advantages of
a Cook's Agency, was still invested with the glamour of romance; for
once he devoted himself to the reality of contemporary life, even
though the daring departure into realism was thinly veiled by the
introduction of that rather unfortunate allegorical figure of Liberty
with her clumsy draperies and badly painted tricolour flag. The
top-hat and frock-coat, hitherto considered incompatible with a grand
pictorial conception, enter with triumphant defiance into the painter's
art; and they detract nothing from the epic grandeur of this truly
historical composition. In many ways "The Barricade" was more daringly
unconventional than any of the earlier pictures which had stamped
Delacroix as a revolutionary. Yet its success was immediate and final.
That the artist was awarded the Cross of the Legion of Honour, was
perhaps a recognition of his political sympathies rather than of his
artistry. But this time Delacroix found favour with the public and the
critics.
At the same Salon was to be seen another of Delacroix's most striking
masterpieces, "The Assassination of the Bishop of Liege," for which he
had found the subject in Sir Walter Scott's "Quentin Durward," and
which was painted for Louis-Philippe, then Duke of Orleans. It is a
marvellously vivid realisation of this terrific scene. "Who would ever
have thought that one could paint noise and tumult?" wrote Theophile
Gautier in his enthusiastic appreciation of this work. "Movement is
all very well, but this little canvas howls, yells, and blasphemes!"
The realisation of the wild and sanguinary orgy described by Scott is
complete and absolute; and yet, in the long list of Delacroix's
"illustrative" pictures, there is none that is so strictly pictorial in
conception and less tied to the letter of the author's description. It
is not so much the detail, the personal action of each participator in
the drama, upon which the artist depends to tell this ferocious tale of
unbridled passion, but the atmosphere of vague terror, the mysterious
gloom of the lofty hall, the flaring flames of the torches, the flashes
of brilliant reflections thrown up from the luminous centre provided by
the white tablecloth, of the importance of which Delacroix was well
aware when he said one evening to his friend Villot: "To-morrow I shall
attack that cursed tablecloth which will be my Austerlitz or my
Waterloo." It was his Austerlitz.
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