Part 2
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'État, 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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PLATE IV.--THE CRUCIFIXION
(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.
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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 Liège," 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 Théophile 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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PLATE V.--THE BRIDE OF ABYDOS
(In the Louvre)
A great reader of English literature, Delacroix found the inspiration for many remarkable paintings in the works of Byron, who was one of the idols of the French Romanticists. As was his wont, Delacroix produced several versions of this subject, which shows Zuleika trying to prevent Selim from giving the signal to his comrades. A smaller variant, painted like the Louvre picture in 1843, and measuring only 14 in. by 10 in., realised the high price of £1282 at public auction in 1874.
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"The Assassination of the Bishop of Liège" was painted in 1829, the same year to which we owe that superbly handled and strangely fascinating auto-portrait of the artist at the Louvre, which he left to his faithful servant, Jenny le Guillou, on condition that she should give it to the Louvre on the day when the Orleans family were to gain once more possession of the throne. This event did not come to pass, but the picture nevertheless reached its final destination by gift of Mme. Durieu in 1872. Delacroix's strangely fascinating personality is completely revealed in this masterpiece of artistic auto-biography. In every feature it recalls that famous description of the master given by Baudelaire in his series of critical essays, "L'Art Romantique":--
"He was all energy, but energy derived from the nerves and the will; for, physically, he was frail and delicate. The tiger, watching its prey, has less light in its eyes and has less impatient quivering in its muscles, than could be perceived in our great painter when with his whole soul he flung himself on an idea or endeavoured to seize a dream. The very physical character of his physiognomy, his Peruvian or Malay complexion; his eyes which were large and black but had narrowed owing to the habit of half closing them when fixing an object, and seemed to test the light; his abundant and glossy hair; his obstinate forehead; his tight-drawn lips to which the perpetual tension of the will had given a cruel expression--in a word, his whole person suggested the thought of an exotic origin."
It is interesting to note how completely this vivid description of the mature man tallies not only with the painted portrait of Delacroix at the age of thirty-one, but with another description of the adolescent, left by his college friend, Philarète Chasle, who speaks of him as "a lad, with olive-hued forehead, flashing eyes, a mobile face with prematurely sunken cheeks, abundant wavy black hair, betraying southern origin."
IV
The _légion d'honneur_ was not the only reward that attended Delacroix's success at the Salon of 1831. He received permission to accompany, at the expense of the Government, Count Mornay's mission to Morocco, which set out in January of the following year. To visit the East had been the dream of Delacroix's life. Its fulfilment marked an important step in the evolution of his art. Now at last he was brought into actual contact with that life and colour of the romantic East which had for so many years been pictured by his vivid imagination. He was away altogether about six months, and much of this time was spent _en route_ and in Spain which he visited on his home journey, so that it was obviously impossible for him to undertake any works on an ambitious scale during his sojourn in Africa. But he never interrupted his feverish activity, and brought back with him a whole series of sketch-books filled with pictorial and literary notes to which he had many an occasion to refer when, after his return to the daily routine of his Paris life, he proceeded upon embodying his new experience of brilliant light, sumptuous colour, and picturesque life in a long succession of paintings devoted to Eastern subjects.
Delacroix's Moroccan sketch-books, which are among the treasured possessions of the Louvre, constitute one of the most interesting documents ever left by artist's hand. There is always a peculiar fascination about an artist's self-revelations in moments when his mind is far away from the public to whom he directs his appeal in his finished pictures. And these sketch-books were intended for no eyes but his own. They contain a diary of his progress day by day, vivid impressions of land and people, interspersed with accounts and notes of purchases, and through all the pages run his swiftly sketched, brilliant pictorial notes, set down with the sureness of long experience and practice--sketches of scenery, life, types of natives and animals, architectural details and details of costumes, jotted down with any material that happened to be handy. Some are sketched in pure colour-washes in bold flat masses, some in pencil or pen and ink heightened with strong blobs of water-colour, others in pure outline; and generally they are accompanied by explanatory notes hastily scribbled in pencil. Throughout is to be noted the same swift impulsiveness and definiteness of purpose, the utmost expressiveness obtained by the greatest economy of means. There are some slight thumb-nail sketches--I can recall one in particular of a galloping Bedouin Arab--that verge on the miraculous in the sense of life and movement, the summing up of all the essentials by means of a few strokes of the pen of almost niggardly paucity.
But infinitely more important in its bearing upon his future work than all the tangible yield of this fruitful journey, was the retention by Delacroix's memory of the brilliant colour visions which had met his delighted eyes in the dazzling light of the East. The result was an entirely new conception of chromatic effects and an infinitely more sensuous use of his pigments than is to be found in any of his earlier works. Before his journey to Morocco, Delacroix, though already essentially a colourist in his method if compared with the draughtsmen of the David-Ingres School, paid but little attention to the quality of paint _per se_. Colour served him to enhance the dramatic effectiveness of his compositions, and pigment had assumed a vital function in the building up of forms; but he was still addicted to an excessive use of bituminous browns and warm glazes and paid little or no attention to what the modern studio jargon terms the "preciousness of paint." With the "Algerian Women in their Apartment," which he sent to the Salon of 1834, he entered upon an entirely new phase. It is painted in a rich impasto of luminous colours which sparkle in unbroken strength through an ambient of soft silvery grey atmosphere. The very choice of subject indicates a significant change. In the place of dramatic climax or tempestuous movement and passion and violent emotion, we find here complete repose and the indolent lassitude engendered by the luxurious comfort and by the strong scent of burning spices in the Eastern harem. In a subject of this kind the artist could allow himself to yield completely to the sensuous enjoyment of the rare and at the time entirely novel harmonies of pure, beautiful colour evolved by his brush. The superbly painted negress on the right of the composition undoubtedly owes much to the Spanish masters whom Delacroix must have studied during his brief visit to the Peninsula; and there is as little doubt that she in turn became the progenitor of the wonderful negress in Manet's "Olympia." Indeed, Delacroix at this stage must be considered Manet's precursor and source of inspiration.
The "Algerian Women" was a State commission for which Delacroix was paid the absurdly inadequate sum of £120. His indignation was great when he learnt that a higher value had been put upon a worse than mediocre picture by Decaisne. He almost refused to deliver the picture, but was eventually reconciled by the placing with him of a more important commission, namely, "The Entry of the Crusaders into Constantinople" for the Gallery of Versailles. He was given the commission--but he was at the same time informed that the King wanted a picture which did "not look like a Delacroix"! This picture, which is now at the Louvre, was first shown at the Salon of 1841, and is undoubtedly one of the finest works of the master's maturity. One has only to compare it with "The Massacre of Scio"--in many ways a kindred subject--to realise the master's prodigious advance during the intervening years. The earlier picture, in spite of its undeniably fine qualities, cannot compare with "The Crusaders" as regards subdued splendour of colour. Delacroix himself admitted that the idea of "The Massacre" came to him in front of Gros's "The Plague-stricken at Jaffa." "J'ai mal lavé la palette de Gros," was the wording of his own confession. There is no trace of Gros in the sumptuous scheme of "The Crusaders," and the violent expression of his youthful sense of the dramatic is toned down by a note of sympathetic sadness in the principal figure, accentuated by the unconventional massing of shadow over the group which occupies the centre of the composition.
In the year after his return from Morocco, Delacroix was, largely through the influence of M. Thiers, entrusted with the decoration of the Salon du Roi, at the Palais Bourbon, and thus given the first opportunity for a display of his decorative genius which, whatever has been said to the contrary, was generously acknowledged by his contemporaries, and was given ample scope from 1833 to the time of his death in 1863. But before discussing his architectural decorations it may be as well to sketch in brief outline the course of the remaining years of his life--a life of ceaseless productive energy, interrupted only by spells of illness, but otherwise strangely uneventful. After the references in the preceding pages of the important pictures which constitute, as it were, the landmarks in Delacroix's career, it would be as impossible as it is superfluous to describe, or even to enumerate, the masterpieces produced year by year by his indefatigable brush. A volume of considerable bulk would be needed for a mere list, for, according to Robaut's statement at the beginning of his catalogue: "Eugène Delacroix has left about 9140 works, of which number 853 are paintings, 1525 pastels, water-colours, or wash-drawings, 6629 drawings, 24 engravings, 109 lithographs, and over 60 albums!"
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PLATE VI.--DANTE AND VIRGIL
(In the Louvre)
This is the great picture with which Delacroix, then twenty-four years of age, made his debut at the Salon of 1822. The dramatic power of the central group and the frenzied movement and superb modelling of the nude figures clinging to the boat, caused an immense sensation with a public accustomed to the frigid classicism of the David School. Unfortunately the picture is now badly cracked and discoloured, probably owing to the use of bituminous pigment, which Delacroix only discarded at a later period.
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Whether it be due to his unshaken perseverance on the path he had chosen from the very outset, or to the waning interest caused by the wearing off of the novelty, Delacroix's art was now more readily accepted, or, at any rate, discussed without the bitterness of the early attacks. Nevertheless, even now, and indeed to the end of his life, he could only obtain wretched prices for his pictures, and the Academy remained implacably hostile, until the special collection of his principal works at the International Exhibition of 1855 brought him at last that general public applause that had till then been denied to him. Delacroix himself showed no bitterness to the Academy, and presented himself time after time for election, his claims being invariably couched in terms as modest as they were dignified. His first attempt was in 1837, when the votes were cast in favour of Schnetz. Two vacancies occurred in 1838, and on both occasions Delacroix knocked at the doors of the Academy, but Langlois and Couder were preferred to him. His next attempt was in 1849, when Cogniet secured the majority of votes. When he presented himself again in 1853, insult was added to injury, his very candidature being refused! Time has avenged the wrong; the names of Schnetz, Langlois, Couder, and Cogniet are all but forgotten, whilst Delacroix has become immortal.
Encouraged by his triumph at the Universal Exposition of 1855, Delacroix presented himself for the sixth time when the next vacancy arose in 1857, and this time his perseverance at last found its reward--he was elected just before he entered upon the seventh decade of his life. But even now he was denied peaceful enjoyment of his tardy success. His next contributions to the Salon, in 1859, led to a renewed outburst of vituperative criticism and abuse, and this time Delacroix was hurt to the quick. He decided not to expose himself in future to the gibes of his detractors, and for the remaining four years of his life, although continuing his artistic activity to the very end, refrained from contributing to public exhibitions.
The years 1837-1841 mark a fruitful epoch in Delacroix's career. The masterpieces that issued from his studio in these years would alone have sufficed to establish his lasting fame. In 1837 he painted the magnificent "Battle of Taillebourg," which is the glory of the gallery of battle pictures at Versailles, but found so little favour with the jury of the Salon that it narrowly escaped being rejected. The tumult and confusion of hand-to-hand fighting had never before been rendered with such force and such absence of heroic attitudinising. To the next year we owe "The Enraged Medea," of the Lille Museum, and that extraordinary scene of fitful, jerky, furious movement known as "Les Convulsionnaires de Tanger," which, after having twice changed hands at public auction during the artist's lifetime, for £87 in 1852 and for £1160 in 1858, rose to £1940 at a sale held in 1869, and finally found a purchaser for £3800 in 1881.
The "Jewish Wedding in Morocco," in which the painter's concern with true tone-values and beautiful quality of pigment is carried even further than in the "Algerian Women," and the intensely dramatic "Hamlet and the Gravediggers"--both are now at the Louvre--were his chief works in 1839; whilst in the following year he devoted his energies to the large "Justice of Trajan" (now extensively restored) at the Rouen Gallery, and the powerful "Shipwreck of Don Juan," surely one of the most tragic and impressive pictures ever conceived by human genius. It bears the same relation to the "Dante and Virgil" that "The Crusaders" bears to "The Massacre of Scio." And it is one of the most striking instances of Delacroix's power to make colour itself expressive of the mood of the drama. The conception, though based on Byron's poem, owes little to the literary foundation--that is to say, it is not illustrative in the sense that acquaintance with the poem is essential for its appreciation. It is just a vivid realisation of the combined horrors of shipwreck and starvation in which the tragic aspect of sea and sky is as significant as the ghastliness of the wretches whom hunger has turned into cannibals. The sombre tonality and the flashes of livid light, recall El Greco in his later period. To the year 1841 belongs "The Entry of the Crusaders into Constantinople," of which mention has already been made.
At the Salon of 1845 appeared the large painting of "The Sultan of Morocco surrounded by his Guard," which was bought by the State for the Toulouse Gallery at the price of £160. Baudelaire, ever an ardent admirer of Delacroix, draws attention to the peculiar quality of the colour harmony in this picture which, "notwithstanding the splendour of the tones, is grey, grey like Nature, grey like the atmosphere of a summer day, when the sunlight spreads like a twilight of vibrating dust upon every object." "The Sultan of Morocco" was one of the last large canvases produced by the master, whose best energies were now absorbed by his gigantic decorative tasks, although he continued to paint an endless succession of easel pictures, many of which were variations of earlier compositions.
V