Eugène Delacroix (1798-1863), who belonged to a family that had given
to France many distinguished statesmen and soldiers, was a pupil
of Guérin, whose conventional teaching, however, was little to the
taste of a young man whose passionate nature had been fired by his
extensive reading of romantic literature, and who preferred to form
his style on the works of Rubens and other old masters at the Louvre,
and to benefit from his intercourse with Géricault and Bonington. The
_Dante and Virgil_, which is now in a deplorable state of neglect, was
bought by the State at the not very generous price of £50. Delacroix’s
next Salon picture, _The Massacre of Scio_ (No. 208), caused an even
greater storm of abuse of the young artist who had dared to depict the
horrors of this scene from the Greek War of Independence, as it was
thought, in all their crudeness, without the heroical and theatrical
poses that were deemed necessary for pictorial “histories.” The
magnificent atmospheric background owes its origin to Delacroix’s
first acquaintance with the _Hay Wain_ and two other pictures sent by
Constable to the Salon of 1824, which caused the impetuous young artist
to repaint in a few days the sky and landscape. The picture was again
bought by the State, the price this time being raised to £240. A superb
study for the dead mother and child in the right-hand corner has been
bequeathed by M. Cheramy, the present owner, to the National Gallery,
where it is to be hung next to “the best Constable.”
It is impossible here to give a full account of the twenty-one
paintings by Delacroix at the Louvre, to which should be added his
decorative masterpiece, the centre of the ceiling in the Galerie
d’Apollon. We must content ourselves with a brief reference to his
more important canvases, first of which in order of date is _The 28th
of July 1830: Liberty leading the People_ (No. 209), better known as
_The Barricade_. The introduction of a bourgeois with a top-hat in this
stirring scene of contemporary heroism was another act of defiance.
But the dramatic power of the conception, which suffers but is by no
means destroyed by the wretched allegorical figure of Liberty, and
the artist’s appeal to political passion, caused the picture to be an
enormous success.