F.V. EUGÈNE DELACROIX & THE FRENCH ROMANTIC SCHOOL

All good things have and end, and The Grandma and her friends have returned to their homes: Corto Maltese to somewhere along the ocean, Joseph de Ca'th Lon to his beloved Switzerland, and Claire Fontaine and The Grandma to Barcelona.

During the trip from Sant Feliu de Guíxols to Barcelona, The Grandma has been reading about Eugène Delacroix, the French Romantic artist who died on a day like today in 1863.

Ferdinand Victor Eugène Delacroix (26 April 1798-13 August 1863) was a French Romantic artist who was regarded as the leader of the French Romantic school. In contrast to the Neoclassical perfectionism of his chief rival Ingres, Delacroix took for his inspiration the art of Rubens and painters of the Venetian Renaissance, with an attendant emphasis on colour and movement rather than clarity of outline and carefully modelled form.

Dramatic and romantic content characterized the central themes of his maturity, and led him not to the classical models of Greek and Roman art, but to travel in North Africa, in search of the exotic. Friend and spiritual heir to Théodore Géricault, Delacroix was also inspired by Lord Byron, with whom he shared a strong identification with the forces of the sublime, of nature in often violent action.

However, Delacroix was given to neither sentimentality nor bombast, and his Romanticism was that of an individualist. In the words of Baudelaire, Delacroix was passionately in love with passion, but coldly determined to express passion as clearly as possible. Together with Ingres, Delacroix is considered one of the last old Masters of painting and is one of the few who was ever photographed.

As a painter and muralist, Delacroix's use of expressive brushstrokes and his study of the optical effects of colour profoundly shaped the work of the Impressionists, while his passion for the exotic inspired the artists of the Symbolist movement. A fine lithographer, Delacroix illustrated various works of William Shakespeare, the Scottish author Walter Scott, and the German author Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.

Eugène Delacroix was born on 26 April 1798 at Charenton-Saint-Maurice in Seine, near Paris. His mother was Victoire Oeben, the daughter of the cabinetmaker Jean-François Oeben.

Delacroix drew inspiration from many sources over his career, such as the literary works of William Shakespeare and Lord Byron, and the artistry of Michelangelo. But, throughout his life, he felt a constant need for music, saying in 1855 that nothing can be compared with the emotion caused by music; that it expresses incomparable shades of feeling. He also said, while working at Saint-Sulpice, that music put him in a state of exaltation that inspired his painting. It was often from music, whether the most melancholy renditions of Chopin or the pastoral works of Beethoven, that Delacroix was able to draw the most emotion and inspiration. At one point during his life, Delacroix befriended and made portraits of the composer Chopin; in his journal, Delacroix praised him frequently.

At the sale of his work in 1864, 9140 works were attributed to Delacroix, including 853 paintings, 1525 pastels and water colours, 6629 drawings, 109 lithographs, and over 60 sketch books. The number and quality of the drawings, whether done for constructive purposes or to capture a spontaneous movement, underscored his explanation, Colour always occupies me, but drawing preoccupies me.

On 13 August, Delacroix died. He was buried in Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris.

More information: The Art Story

 Do all the work you can; 
that is the whole philosophy 
of the good way of life.

Eugène Delacroix

'LA LIBERTE GUIDANT LE PEUPLE' BY EUGÈNE DELACROIX

Today, The Grandma has been remembering last time she visited Le Louvre in Paris, and she could admire Liberty Leading the People, the painting by the French artist Eugène Delacroix.

Liberty Leading the People, in French La Liberté guidant le peuple is a painting of the Romantic era by the French artist Eugène Delacroix, commemorating the July Revolution of 1830 that toppled King Charles X (r. 1824-1830).

A bare-breasted woman of the people with a Phrygian cap personifying the concept and Goddess of Liberty, accompanied by a young boy brandishing a pistol in each hand, leads a group of various people forward over a barricade and the bodies of the fallen while holding aloft the flag of the French Revolution -the tricolour, which again became France's national flag after these events- in one hand, and brandishing a bayonetted musket with the other. The figure of Liberty is also viewed as a symbol of France and the French Republic known as Marianne. The painting is sometimes wrongly thought to depict the French Revolution of 1789.

Liberty Leading the People is exhibited in the Louvre in Paris.

By the time Delacroix painted Liberty Leading the People, he was already the acknowledged driving force of the Romantic school in French painting. Delacroix, who was born as the Age of Enlightenment was giving way to the ideas and style of romanticism, rejected the emphasis on precise drawing that characterised the academic art of his time, and instead gave a new prominence to freely brushed colour.

Delacroix painted this work in the autumn of 1830. In a letter to his brother dated 21 October, he wrote: My bad mood is vanishing thanks to hard work. I've embarked on a modern subject -a barricade. And if I haven't fought for my country at least I'll paint for her. The painting was first exhibited at the official Paris Salon of 1831.

Delacroix depicted Liberty as both an allegorical goddess-figure and a robust woman of the people. The mound of corpses and wreckage acts as a kind of pedestal from which Liberty strides, barefoot and bare-breasted, out of the canvas and into the space of the viewer. The Phrygian cap she wears had come to symbolize liberty during the first French Revolution of 1789. The painting has been seen as a marker to the end of the Age of Enlightenment, as many scholars see the end of the French Revolution as the start of the Romantic era.

The fighters are from a mixture of social classes, ranging from the bourgeoisie represented by the young man in a top hat, a student from the prestigious École Polytechnique wearing the traditional bicorne, to the revolutionary urban worker, as exemplified by the boy holding pistols. What they have in common is the fierceness and determination in their eyes. Aside from the flag held by Liberty, a second, minute tricolore can be discerned in the distance flying from the towers of Notre-Dame.

The identity of the man in the top hat has been widely debated. The suggestion that it was a self-portrait by Delacroix has been discounted by modern art historians. In the late 19th century, it was suggested the model was the theatre director Étienne Arago; others have suggested the future curator of the Louvre, Frédéric Villot; but there is no firm consensus on this point.

Several of the figures are probably borrowed from a print by popular artist Nicolas Charlet, a prolific illustrator who Delacroix believed captured, more than anyone else, the peculiar energy of the Parisians.

Although Delacroix was not the first artist to depict Liberty in a Phrygian cap, his painting may be the best known early version of the figure commonly known as Marianne, a symbol of the French Republic and of France in general.

The painting may have influenced Victor Hugo's 1862 novel Les Misérables. In particular, the character of Gavroche is widely believed to have been inspired by the figure of the pistols-wielding boy running over the barricade. The novel describes the events of the June Rebellion two years after the revolution celebrated in the painting, the same rebellion that led to its being removed from public view.

More information: Pictorial Composition

The artist who aims at perfection 

in everything achieves it in nothing.

Eugene Delacroix