Eugène Delacroix

Delacroix was a fierce individualist who rejected the neo-classical tradition of Ingres (1780–1867) and Jacques-Louis David (1748–1825) in his search for a personal style. His wild brushwork and compositional inventiveness endow his works with a tenebrous emotional intensity. He experimented with color theory and is known to have invented flochetage, an interweaving of complementary colors that influenced colorists such as Odilon Redon (1840–1916) and Henri Matisse (1869–1954). He tackled a wide range of subject-matter including religious, orientalist and literary subjects as well as portraits and still lifes.

In October 1815, Delacroix joined the studio of Pierre Guérin, where he became a close friend of Théodore Géricault (1791–1824). He complemented his education with visits to the Louvre, studying and copying masters such as Raphael (1483–1520), Titian (1490–1576), Veronese (1528–88) and Rubens (1577–1640). Delacroix experienced early fame, which he cemented during the 1827 Salon when he exhibited the monumental Death of Sardanapalus (1827) inspired by Lord Byron’s (1788–1824) tragedy Sardanapalus (1821). It became an instant icon of Romanticism; influenced by Rubens, the painting’s focus on the materiality of paint was the antithesis of Neo-classicism. It was followed in 1831 by his perhaps most famous work, Liberty Leading the People (1831), an allegory of the July 1830 uprising. It represented a contemporary event with the grandeur of history painting, a concept with which he had already developed with his Massacre at Chios (1824), depicting an episode of the Greek War of Independence. From the 1830s until the end of his life he received state commissions for numerous murals throughout Paris, most famously a chapel in the church of Saint Sulpice (1849-61), a particularly clear example of his flochetage. Known as his ‘last masterpiece’, it played a central role in building his legacy among colourists.