NOTES

INTRODUCTION

1. Baudelaire, Painter of Modern Life, 59.

2. Delacroix treated the subject on a number of occasions, including in the Bourbon Palace Library in the 1840s and in one of his last paintings, in 1862, but the canvas from 1859, now in the National Gallery in London, is the most compelling version. The painting was initially commissioned by Delacroix’s friend the banker Benoît Fould in 1856 but only completed after Fould’s death. On the painting’s development and the various other versions, see L. Johnson, Paintings, 3:150–52.

3. The picture has been interpreted many times. For a summary of criticism from the Salon of 1859, see L. Johnson, Paintings . . . Fourth Supplement, 150–52. For more-recent interpretations, see Tinterow and Loyrette, Origins of Impressionism, 380–81; Loyrette, “Ovid in Exile”; Vincent Pomarède, in A. Sérullaz et al., Delacroix: The Late Work, 234–37; Allard, “Ovide en exil”; and Klaus Schrenk, “Ovid bei den Skythen,” in Eugène Delacroix (2003), 365–66. On the ambiguity of the Ovid theme in Delacroix’s work, see Hannoosh, Painting and the “Journal,” 140–41.

4. Explication des ouvrages (1835), 99.

5. Loyrette, “Ovid in Exile,” was the first to note the likelihood that Strabo was Delacroix’s primary source for his Scythians.

6. Strabo, Geography of Strabo, 199.

7. Ibid., 195–97.

8. Ibid., 197–99.

9. I cite quotations from Delacroix, Journal, simply by page number in parentheses after each quotation. All translations, for this source and others, are my own, unless indicated otherwise.

10. Gautier, Exposition de 1859, 34.

11. Guizot, History of Civilization, 11–12. On Guizot’s admiration for civilization, see Crossley, French Historians, 82–100.

12. I offer a more complete introduction to the idea of civilization and its presence in nineteenth-century art in O’Brien, “What Was Civilisation?,” 1–20.

13. On the origins and history of the word, see Starobinski, Blessings in Disguise, 1–31; Febvre et al., Civilisation; Moras, Ursprung und Entwicklung; Lochore, History of the Idea; Benveniste, Problèmes de linguistique générale, 1:336–45; Bénéton, Histoire de mots; Dampierre, “Note sur ‘culture’”; Bowden, Empire of Civilization, 23–46; Mazlish, “Civilization”; Pagden, “‘Defense of Civilization’”; and Stocking, Victorian Anthropology.

14. Meek, Social Science, and Wolloch, “Civilizing Process.”

15. Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, 33, 42, 43.

16. Ibid., 58–59.

17. All quotations about Girardin come from Delacroix, Journal, 658–60. Closely related passages are on 497–98, 748–99, 809–10, and 1268.

18. The words in quotation marks or closely allied ones appear again and again in Delacroix’s writing and occur many times in what follows. Nonetheless, for readers wishing to see examples of them in context, here are some from Hannoosh’s edition of the journal: “mysterious”: 90, 564, 696, 1567; “vague”: 118, 475, 1528, 1796; “above” or “beyond” thought: 118, 475, 1178; “move profoundly,” “possess,” or “lift up” the “soul” or the “mind”: 156, 696, 1567, 1638, 1796. It should be noted that when Delacroix uses the term “mind” in this context, it carries the ability of the French cognate (esprit) to designate a broad range of incorporeal experiences that include the spiritual.

CHAPTER 1

1. On the Chios considered in such terms, see, for example, Athanassoglou-Kallmyer, French Images, and Grigsby, Extremities, 281–314. On the Sardanapalus, see, among others, Lambertson, “Delacroix’s Sardanapalus.”

2. As others—especially Michèle Hannoosh in Painting and the “Journal”—have explored Delacroix’s musings on the subject of civilization and barbarism in depth, I only summarize them here and, in the notes that follow, refer the reader to more elaborate interpretations. At times I quote Delacroix at length in order to give the full flavor of his literary voice and to allow him to articulate his own understanding of civilization and its related ideas. I treat his thoughts on civilization during the last twenty-five years of his life as a more or less coherent body of work and have remarked on their chronology only when it seems directly relevant, as, for example, when his thinking relates to a contemporaneous event or when his thoughts changed significantly over time.

3. For examples of Delacroix’s thoughts about the divine, see Delacroix, Journal, 862, 1000, 1819. On Delacroix’s religious paintings, which have received surprisingly little attention, see Delacroix: Peintures et dessins; Polistena, Religious Paintings; and Foucart, Renouveau, 118, 127–28, 244–49, and 321–22.

4. On another occasion he expressed a similar thought: “It is obvious that nature worries very little whether man has a mind” (504). Like many Enlightenment thinkers, Delacroix often tried to identify the things that separated man from nature, and usually pointed to self-consciousness or the possession of reason. But reason only gained man so much: “Man believes that the world is made for him, and relates everything to himself. He is appalled by the storms that carry off his harvests or destroy his houses. He is, however, only one point in the universe. Reason, which was given to him and to no other creatures, should above all else inspire in him resignation to the necessary laws” (1813). Whatever else reason might accomplish, man had to accept this: “Man dominates nature and is dominated by it. He is the only one who not only resists it but also surmounts its laws, and who spreads his influence by his will and activity. But that creation was made for him is . . . far from evident. Everything that he builds is ephemeral like him: time topples his edifices, fills in his canals, destroys knowledge, even the names of nations” (839). For more on civilization, humanity, and nature, see Hannoosh, Painting and the “Journal,” 50–51, 145.

5. See Delacroix, Journal, 1809, 1813 (two separate entries develop the idea).

6. As Delacroix summarizes it in another version, “Animals don’t feel the weight of time. They have no other worries than material life. The savage himself doesn’t know what ennui is; he barely senses a distant danger. Repose is for him the supreme good; he does little if he isn’t pressed by need, and doesn’t look for entertainment to fill the moments that he is not sleeping or hunting his prey. This carefree life is the true life of nature. It is civilization, on the other hand, that created all the arts destined to console man or delight him” (1809).

7. If Rousseau sometimes portrays the state of nature as a golden age, he more often describes it as brutish, and claims, in any event, that it is only a mental construct, not a reality. And he never advocates the proscription of the arts and sciences, however much he may have seen them as a corrupting influence or a product of social inequality. On this point, see Shklar, Men and Citizens, 6, 24, 110–11, and Todorov, On Human Diversity, 277–82.

    On another occasion Delacroix similarly attacks Rousseau’s rosy vision of the savage. When the philosopher Pierre Leroux approvingly cites Rousseau’s famous line “Man is born free” in his De l’humanité (1840), Delacroix snipes,

________ 

Never has anyone proclaimed more ridiculous nonsense, however philosophical he may be. Here is the beginning of philosophy with these gentlemen. Is there in creation a being more like a slave than man; weakness, needs make him depend on the elements and his kind. . . . The passions that he finds in himself are the cruelest tyrants he has to fight, and you can add that to resist them is to resist his very nature.

    —He [Leroux] also doesn’t want any sort of hierarchy; for this reason he finds Christianity especially odious; this [Christianity], to my mind, is what makes the highest morality; submission to the law of nature, resignation to human suffering, that is the final word of all reason (and therefore submission to written law, divine or human). (393–94)

________ 

Hannoosh notes that in these references, as well as in a passage on philosophers (1723), Delacroix is taking issue with Rousseau’s argument in his Discours sur les arts et les sciences (1750) that the arts and sciences are sources of moral corruption. As the last part of the previous quotation reveals, Delacroix was especially hostile to Leroux’s proposals because of the link to political and religious questions.

8. Pagden, “‘Defense of Civilization,’” and Shklar, Men and Citizens, 8–10.

9. On the painting, see L. Johnson, Paintings, 1:78–80; Moffitt, Native American ‘Sauvage’”; and Christiansen and Tinterow, “European Paintings,” 41–42. On Delacroix’s interest in Native Americans, see Beetem, “George Catlin.”

10. This is quite different from Norbert Elias’s more elaborate theory of the evolution of the hunt. Elias argues that earlier forms of hunting had been “a kind of forepleasure experienced in anticipation of the real pleasures, the pleasures of killing and eating. The pleasure of killing animals was enhanced by its utility. . . . Earlier forms of hunting thus imposed on their followers few restraints. People enjoyed the pleasures of hunting and killing animals in whatever way they could and ate as many of them as they liked.” As hunting develops into a sport, Elias sees an increase in the restraints placed on hunters. “Increasing restraints upon the use of physical force and particularly upon killing, and, as an expression of these restraints, a displacement of the pleasure experienced in doing violence to the pleasure experienced in seeing violence done [by, for example, hounds], can be observed as symptoms of a civilizing spurt in many other spheres of human activity.” Yet even if this civilizing process is restraining, it nonetheless preserves the pleasures provided by former, more violent activities. Moreover, pleasure comes less from killing and eating animals than from the pursuit itself. See Elias, “Essay on Sport”; quotations from 161 and 163. For Elias’s larger understanding of the civilizing process, see Elias, Civilizing Process, vol. 1.

11. A comparable passage appears on 1249–50.

12. For Byron on this theme, see Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, canto 4, v. 108. A similar idea was contained in the notion that society proceeded in cycles from barbarism to civilization, to decadence, and back to barbarism again. Delacroix never saw a clear pattern in history, but he was nonetheless fascinated by developments from within that caused societies to decline. On Delacroix and theories of decadence, see Hannoosh, Painting and the “Journal,” 172–74.

13. For similar sentiments, see Delacroix, Journal, 1706.

14. The notion that modernity cheapens life by taking away the experience of working hard to achieve happiness and by collapsing the distinction between desire and its fulfillment is a repeated theme in the journal. See especially ibid., 748–49, 839–40, and 1638.

15. Here he is developing the idea: “But man himself, when he gives in to the savage instinct that is at the core of his nature, does he not conspire with the elements to destroy beautiful works? Does not barbarism come almost periodically, and like the Fury that waits for Sisyphus rolling his rock up the mountain, to knock over and confound, to bring the night after a too bright light? And whatever it is that has given man an intelligence superior to that of the beasts, does it not take pleasure in punishing him with this same intelligence?” (504).

16. Another example: “The savage always returns. The most extreme civilization cannot banish from our cities atrocious crimes that seem the lot of peoples blinded by barbarism.—Similarly, the human mind left to its own devices falls into a stupid infancy. It prefers toys to objects worthy of admiration” (402).

17. For example, the idea is in La Bruyère—“All strangers are not barbarians, nor are all our countrymen civilised” (La Bruyère, “Of Opinions,” in “Characters,” 339)—and in Montaigne (Montaigne, “Of Cannibals,” in Complete Essays, 156).

18. On the rise of this meaning, see Lochore, History of the Idea, 4–19.

19. Frederick Bohrer argues that Delacroix took a “palpable interest” in newly imported Assyrian objects but nonetheless was not significantly engaged with them as an artist. See Bohrer, Orientalism and Visual Culture, 85.

20. Hannoosh, “Painter’s Impressions,” 14–15. On Delacroix’s investments, see also A. Sérullaz, “Delacroix et le monde de la finance.”

21. Ibid., 14–20.

22. For a contrasting view of Delacroix’s opinion of progress, one that relates it to his views on narrative and time, see Hannoosh, Painting and the “Journal,” 19.

23. Clark argues that anxieties about events in Paris culminated in a “crisis” in May of 1850, during which the control and decorum of the journal gave way to far more violent, irrational outbursts filled with the sort of bizarre imagery Delacroix normally explored only in his painting. See Clark, Absolute Bourgeois, 126–41.

24. L. Johnson, Paintings, 3:xiv.

25. Delacroix once copied down a passage by Chateaubriand to this effect. See Delacroix, Journal, 1315.

26. Baudelaire, “Pauvre Belgique,” in Œuvres complètes, 820.

27. Baudelaire, “Edgar Poe: Sa vie et ses œuvres,” in Œuvres completes, 297–99. Baudelaire further developed the idea of modernity and Americanization as a return to barbarism in his Journaux intimes.

28. Starobinski, Blessings in Disguise, 27.

29. Andrieu, “Journal d’Andrieu,” in Delacroix, Journal, 1832.

30. For more on the association of ennui and modernity in Delacroix’s thought, as well as his belief that work was a protection against it, see Hannoosh, Painting and the “Journal,” 11–13. On painting and other arts in relation to ennui, see ibid., 29–33, 36, 38, 60. See also Larue, Romantisme et mélancolie, 98–108, 141–44.

31. Guizot, History of Civilization, 18.

32. A century later Sigmund Freud would insist on this aspect of civilization: “No feature, however, seems better to characterize civilization than its esteem and encouragement of man’s higher mental activities—his intellectual, scientific and artistic achievements—and the leading role that it assigns to ideas in human life. Foremost among those ideas are the religious systems, on whose complicated structure I have endeavored to throw light elsewhere. Next come the speculations of philosophy; and finally what might be called man’s ‘ideal’—his ideas of a possible perfection of individuals, or of peoples or of the whole of humanity, and the demands he sets up on the basis of such ideas.” Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, 41.

33. Guizot, Études sur les beaux-arts.

34. The inventory of Delacroix’s Parisian library made after his death describes some 734 volumes (see Bessis, “Inventaire”), and the sales catalogue of his library in his Champrosay country house had 759 entries (see Catalogue des livres). Many of these were for multivolume works, including a thirty-four-volume compendium, published by Didot, of French drama. This latter catalogue and his journal show that in the 1840s and 1850s his reading included Greek poetry and literature (Homer, Hesiod, Theognis, Musaeus Grammaticus, Moschus, Phocylides, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Herodotus, Euripides, Xenephon, Isocrates, Plato, Aristotle, Theophrastus, Demosthenes, Menander, Alcaeus, Bion, Plutarch), Latin poetry and literature (Terence, Cicero, Virgil, Julius Caesar, Horace, Livy, Propertius, Ovid, Seneca, Phaedrus, Pliny, Lucan, Epictetus, Tacitus, Marcus Aurelius), and especially the French classics from the Renaissance to the beginning of the nineteenth century (Rabelais, Charron, Montaigne, Descartes, Corneille, Molière, Bossuet, Boileau, Fénelon, La Fontaine, Perrault, Racine, La Bruyère, La Rochefoucauld, Montesquieu, Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot, Sedaine, Beaumarchais, Bayle, Chamfort, Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, André Chénier, Madame de Staël, Chateaubriand, Senancour, Maine de Biran). He also read many foreign classics (Dante, Machiavelli, Ariosto, Tasso, Casanova, Alfieri, Cervantes, Milton, Otway, Shakespeare, Pope) as well as more recent foreign literature (Goethe, Schiller, Scott, Lewis, Byron, Thackeray, Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, Franklin, Poe, Emerson, Turgenev). He followed the vogue for medieval literature. His collection contained some twenty volumes of troubadour literature and over a hundred volumes of poetry from the Middle Ages and subsequent eras. And of course he read the major French novelists, playwrights, and poets of his own day (Stendhal, La Touche, Nodier, Lamartine, Balzac, Mérimée, Gautier, Halévy, Hugo, Dumas père and fils, Sue, Sand, Nerval, Musset, Baudelaire), many of whom he knew personally.

    He read extensively in more specialized fields. Beyond those mentioned in the main text, he seems to have enjoyed philosophy and political thought (Constant, Cousin, Custine, Lamennais) and history (Gibbon, Guizot, Michelet, Thiers, Thierry). The Champrosay catalogue reveals a sizable collection of religious texts, including a number promoting Catholic revival, some ten volumes of contemporary works of moral philosophy, and several works devoted to non-European religion and philosophy (Zoroaster, Confucius, Mohammed). Natural history was a particular passion (Buffon, Cuvier, Geoffroy Saint Hilaire, Jussieu), an interest that also led him to collect books on hunting and animals.

    For a summary of Delacroix’s citational practices that also examines some of his reading habits, see Guentner, “Pratiques de la citation.”

35. A full account of Delacroix’s understanding of great art of the past is beyond the scope of this study, but its rough contours are well known. He published two essays that argued, among other things, that the beautiful could not be defined in any singular fashion or that it was, at best, one thing with “many different faces.” Delacroix, “Questions sur le beau” and “Des variations du beau,” in Œuvres littéraires, quotation from “Des variations du beau,” 1:43. At the same time, he profoundly admired the classics of ancient Greece and Rome. The Middle Ages were to him a long period of relative barbarism, followed by the civilizational pinnacle of the High Renaissance. To the usual trinity of Leonardo, Raphael, and Michelangelo he added not only Titian, Veronese, and Rubens (whom he especially admired in the final decade of his life) but also Rembrandt and the Spanish masters. Delacroix often struggled with two conflicting visions of beauty. He spoke of a classical vision of perfect beauty, in which all parts fit seamlessly into a whole, as exemplified for him in the work of Raphael, Virgil, Ariosto, or Racine. At the same time, he admired another vision, in which flights of genius led to stunning experiences, even if the results were uneven and jarring, as exemplified in the work of Michelangelo, Dante, Shakespeare, or Corneille. He clearly felt his own work was more in the mold of the latter group, which was particularly admired by the Romantic generation. Nonetheless, for an artist who has sometimes enjoyed a reputation as a Romantic rebel, his respect for the art of the past was remarkably similar to that of his more orthodox colleagues. The difficulty of classifying Delacroix as either a Romantic artist or a classical artist has been commonplace in writing about him since his own day. The debate is summarized by George Mras in Eugène Delacroix’s Theory of Art, 1–9; much of Mras’s book is devoted to arguing that Delacroix “sought to repair the breach” (9) between the classical and the Romantic. The topic has been reexamined by Dorothy Johnson in “Delacroix’s Dialogue with the French Classical Tradition,” in Wright, Cambridge Companion, 108–29.

36. Delacroix’s deep engagement with classical humanism and his vexed relationship to academic classicism are developed in D. Johnson, “Delacroix’s Dialogue.” Johnson concludes that “Delacroix’s subtle dialogue with the French classical tradition was profound, lasting, and fructive, and went far beyond any simple embrace of or opposition to classical academic conventions” (129). For a demonstration of the depth of his commitment to the tradition of classical humanism, see D. Johnson, David to Delacroix, 172–87.

37. D. Johnson, “Delacroix’s Dialogue,” 114–17. See also Jobert, Delacroix, 308–9, and, on the Marcus Aurelius, Eik Kahng, “Delacroix and the Matter of Finish,” in Delacroix and the Matter of Finish, 13–29.

38. On the association of color and passion in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French painting theory, see J. Lichtenstein, Couleur, 213–43.

39. Most notably, Gotlieb, Plight of Emulation; Crow, Emulation; Bann, True Vine; and Bryson, Tradition and Desire. Gotlieb and Bryson make use of a number of studies of the question of influence in English literature, including Bloom, Anxiety of Influence, and Bate, Burden of the Past.

40. For example:

________ 

The force, the fecundity, this universality of these men of the sixteenth century confounds. Our little, miserable paintings, made for miserable dwellings, the disappearance of those patrons of the arts whose palaces were for generations the sanctuary of beautiful works, which were for families like titles of nobility: these corporations of merchants commissioned works that haunt the rulers of our days, and from artists of a caliber that could accomplish all tasks. (1058)

________ 

The immense generative power of the forefathers points up the puniness of modern artistic efforts, a puniness that is figured literally in the small size of modern pictures. Yet the fault does not really lie with the artists. In this instance, Delacroix relates the decline of grand-style painting to the disappearance of noble patronage, but he was more inclined to blame it on the disappearance of a serious public for painting. In another instance he blames the decline in painting on the absence of good taste, particularly among the newly moneyed middle classes; on a misguided, “sterile” criticism; and on the scientific bent of his epoch:

________ 

The arts since the sixteenth century, a point of perfection, are only a perpetual decadence. The change that has taken place in minds and customs is more the cause than a scarcity of great artists: because [neither] the seventeenth century nor the eighteenth nor the nineteenth has lacked them. The general absence of taste, the wealth gradually accruing to the middle classes, the ever greater authority of a sterile criticism best suited to encouraging mediocrity and discouraging great talents, the inclination of minds attuned to useful sciences, the rise of prominent intellectuals who scare away the products of the imagination—all these causes together fatally condemn the arts to be more and more beholden to the caprice of fashion and to lose all high-mindedness [élévation]. (1077)

________ 

He goes on to characterize the problem explicitly in terms of civilizational rise and decline:

________ 

There is in all civilization a precise point where human intelligence is allowed to show all its force; it seems that during these brief moments, comparable to a flash of lightning in a dark sky, there is almost no interval between the aurora of this brilliant light and the final end of its splendor. The night that follows it is more or less profound, but the return of the light is impossible. There must be a renaissance of manners [mœurs] in order to have one in the arts: this point that is placed between two barbarisms, one whose cause is ignorance, and another, even more irremediable, that comes from the excess and abuse of knowledge. (1077)

________ 

Again the arts are at the mercy of larger social developments, although here he only mentions, cryptically, an “excess and abuse of knowledge.” Nothing less than a “renaissance of manners” will bring them back.

    In still another instance, he wonders why, since the seventeenth century, artistic taste had declined as political institutions had progressed:

________ 

Voltaire complained already about bad taste, and he had one foot, so to speak, in the great century [il touche encore pour ainsi dire au grand siècle]; in this regard, he is worthy of this century; however, the taste for simplicity, which is none other than beauty, has disappeared. How do modern philosophers, who have written so many beautiful things about the gradual development of humanity, harmonize, in their systems, this decadence of the works of the mind with the progress of political institutions? (497)

________ 

41. On Chenavard, see Sloane, Paul Marc Joseph Chenavard; Sloane, “Paul Chenavard”; Germer, Historizität und Autonomie, 328–400; Chaudonneret, Paul Chenavard; Guernsey, Artist and the State, 149–89; Grunewald, Paul Chenavard; and Gotlieb, Plight of Emulation. My account follows in particular Gotlieb’s analysis of the exchanges between Delacroix and Chenavard.

42. Hannoosh, Painting and the “Journal,” 24–25, 173–79.

43. Baudelaire, Œuvres complètes, 633–34.

44. The first theme is found in Delacroix’s essay “De l’enseignement du dessin” (in Écrits sur l’art, 51–63); for the second, see especially “Des variations du beau” (in ibid., 33–49). For more on Delacroix’s attitudes toward instruction, see Mark Gotlieb, “Delacroix’s Pedagogical Desire,” in Kahng, Delacroix and the Matter of Finish, 57–75.

45. Lovejoy and Boas, Primitivism, 7. They give this as the definition of “cultural” (as opposed to “chronological”) primitivism.

46. For studies of primitivism in periods before Delacroix’s, see Adams, Philosophical Roots, 75–112, and Connelly, Sleep of Reason.

47. Dugas-Montbel, Histoire des poésies, 159. Delacroix wrote Dugas-Montbel’s name down on a sheet now in the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (Special Collection, call no. 860470).

48. Ibid., 157.

49. See Lefebvre, Vie.

50. Homer meant many other things to Delacroix as well, as Hannoosh makes clear in her notes to the journal (1097) and in Hannoosh, “Alexandre et les poèmes,” 421–22.

51. Delacroix came to admire Gothic sculpture after a visit to the Musée de l’Œuvre Notre-Dame de Strasbourg, which confirmed his opinion that beauty is found everywhere: “Il me semble que l’étude de ces modèles d’une époque réputée barbare par moi tout le premier, et remplie pourtant de tout ce qui fait remarquer les beaux ouvrages, m’ôte mes dernières chaines, me confirme dans l’opinion que le beau est partout, et que chaque homme non seulement le voit, mais doit absolument le rendre, à sa manière” (957).

52. On Delacroix’s use of non-Western sources, see L. Johnson, “Two Sources”; L. Johnson, “Towards Delacroix’s Oriental Sources”; Rosenthal, “Mughal Portrait,” 505–6; and Finlay, “Japanese Influence.” Delacroix’s admiration for Chinese wallpaper is evident in his journal (399–400).

53. On primitivism as a mode of artistic practice beginning in the late nineteenth century and continuing to the present day, see Goldwater, Primitivism; Perry, “Primitivism”; Rhodes, Primitivism; Barkan and Bush, Prehistories; Torgovnick, Gone Primitive; Jessup, Antimodernism; and Gombrich, Preference for the Primitive.

54. Baudelaire, “Salon de 1846,” in Critique d’art, 147–48.

55. Connelly, Sleep of Reason, 44–54, 60–61.

56. Ibid., 79–106.

57. Peisse, “Salon.”

58. Vico, New Science, 143–48.

59. Quatremère de Quincy, Essai sur l’idéal, 108–9, 272–73.

60. Hannoosh, Painting and the “Journal,” 9, 23–54, 87–89, 95, 125–26, 188–89.

61. Thus the tendency of most art-historical studies of primitivism to bracket off developments beginning with Gauguin and his generation has occluded more long-standing beliefs connecting the primitive to the communicative potential of the arts. Like many celebrations of the modern, these studies seek to identify primitivism with a sudden and complete rupture in tradition. Among those that seek to describe late nineteenth-century primitivism as categorically different, see especially Rhodes, Primitivism; Perry, “Primitivism”; and Goldwater, Primitivism. Goldwater (xxii and 253–55) explicitly differentiates it from the archaizing practices of earlier nineteenth-century art.

CHAPTER 2

1. On the history and design of the palace, see Joly, Plans, and Lanselle, “Palais-Bourbon.”

2. The ceiling’s many borrowings from, modifications of, and allusions to Raphael are documented in S. Lichtenstein, Delacroix and Raphael, 188–203.

3. Angrand, “Genèse des travaux,” 313, cites documents indicating that Delacroix was promised a major commission as compensation for the fact that his Medea (1838, Musée des beaux-arts, Lille) had been shipped off to Lille against his wishes.

4. Delacroix, Correspondance générale, 2:4.

5. Delacroix’s proposal is in the Archives nationales, Paris, box F²¹ 754. A similar manuscript, possibly the original, is in the Bibliothèque de l’Institut national d’histoire de l’art, MS 250, pièces 112 and 113. All quotations from Delacroix’s proposal are translated from M. Sérullaz, Peintures murales, 49–50, except that Sérullaz misreads dignité as député in his transcription of the description of the conquest of Algiers (as noted to me by Michèle Hannoosh).

6. In what appears to be one of his first attempts at formulating a plan (Bibliothèque de l’Institut national d’histoire de l’art, MS 250, pièce 114v), Delacroix jotted down ideas such as “Civilizing conquests,” “Empire Power of France in the civilizing sense expression of the room,” and “Charlemagne conqueror of the barbarians.” He began a list of battles to commemorate

 

Empire of Charlemagne . . .

Louis XIV receiving the doge of Venice

Bonaparte in Egypt

Entry of Louis XII in Genoa or Marignan

Conquest of Africa. Africa subjugated.

Battle of Marengo or Peace of Ami[ens]

Clovis at Tolbiac pursuing the Roma[ns]

Entry of Charles VIII into Milan

 

A similar emphasis on military subjects and civilization is found in Bibliothèque de l’Institut national d’histoire de l’art, MS 250, pièce 117.

7. M. Sérullaz, Peintures murales, 50.

8. Ibid., 50–51.

9. Hannoosh, Painting and the “Journal,” 128. On this aspect, see also Hopmans, “Delacroix’s Decorations,” 251; Masson, Décor; and Masson, Pictorial Catalogue.

10. Delacroix to Frédéric Villot, 13 September 1838, in Delacroix, Correspondance générale, 2:24.

11. As noted in Hopmans, “Delacroix’s Decorations,” 252–59, and Beetem, “Delacroix’s Mural Paintings,” 5.

12. Hopmans, “Delacroix’s Decorations.”

13. Ibid.

14. See, for example, drawings in the Département des dessins in the Louvre, inv. no. RF9409; the document transcribed by Robaut in the Département des estampes et de la photographie in the Bibliothèque nationale, Paris, R111137; Bibliothèque nationale MS N.a.f. 25069, fol. 145; and the manuscript now in the Getty Research Institute, call no. 860470, sheet 3.

15. The drawing is now in the collection of the Bourbon Palace Library. The quotation comes from Mercey, “Arts en Angleterre,” 904. My discussion and dating of the drawing follow Hopmans, “Delacroix’s Decorations,” 244–50.

16. Marmier, “Russie,” 105. Cited from Hopmans, “Delacroix’s Decorations,” 250.

17. Cited from Hopmans, “Delacroix’s Decorations,” 248.

18. Joubin, “Souvenirs de Louis,” 428–29.

19. Two of his assistants, Louis de Planet and Gustave-Joseph-Marie Lassalle-Bordes, left behind accounts of their work on the ceiling that allow scholars to date many of the pendentives. See Joubin, “Souvenirs de Louis,” and Delacroix, Lettres de Eugène Delacroix, iii–xvi. On the work of his assistants, see also M. Sérullaz, Peintures murales, 57–59; Hersey, “Delacroix’s Imagery,” 383–84; Eugène Delacroix à l’Assemblée nationale, 38–41; Beetem, “Delacroix and His Assistant”; and Geffroy, “Peintures.”

20. See Hopmans, “Delacroix’s Decorations,” 244–49.

21. Readers unfamiliar with the paintings in the ceiling may wish at this point to consult the appendix, where I offer extended interpretations of each. Illustrations of individual works are also found there. Because a detailed discussion of all twenty-two paintings would be too unwieldy at this point in the text, this chapter assumes a basic understanding of their narratives. While my argument about the larger meaning of the ceiling should still be apparent, it develops out of and is bolstered by the interpretations I offer in the appendix.

22. Delacroix’s decision to focus on ancient subjects is recorded on a study for the ceiling in the Louvre: “Antiquity only. One cannot do side by side with each other modern dress and antique dress.” Département des dessins, Louvre, inv. no. RF10710.

23. Ronchaud, “Études sur l’art,” 48–49.

24. Clément de Ris, “Bibliothèque.”

25. The published version was Thoré, “Peintures de la bibliothèque.” Delacroix’s original manuscript is transcribed in Moreau-Nélaton, Delacroix raconté, 2:13–16.

26. Hersey, “Delacroix’s Imagery.”

27. Hersey argues that Delacroix selected his subjects to illustrate laws proposed by Vico that accounted for the development of human societies and their passage through three ages: the Age of Gods, the Age of Heroes, and the Age of Men. Like Vico’s Scienza nuova seconda, according to Hersey, Delacroix’s ceiling warned of the dangers of democracy and promoted monarchy as the ideal form of government. There are many problems with Hersey’s argument, but most troubling for my purposes is his assumption that Delacroix selected his subjects according to a preexisting plan and intended them to offer a neat, closed allegorical meaning. Other problems with Hersey’s interpretation are (1) it depends on a misunderstanding of the physical arrangement of the murals on the ceiling, (2) many subjects treated by Delacroix are not mentioned by Vico, (3) Delacroix never spoke of Vico, and (4) Vico was interpreted in Delacroix’s France in an entirely different way, one that ignored Vico’s deeply antidemocratic, monarchical thesis. For critique of Hersey, see especially Hopmans, “Delacroix’s Decorations,” 241–44.

28. Ribner, Broken Tablets, 98–137.

29. Guernsey, Artist and the State, 83.

30. Briefly, Ribner’s interpretation does not account for many of the pendentives; some of the pendentives are only tenuously related to the passages cited by Guernsey; the pendentives devoted to the destruction of civilization seem to reveal more of a fascination with, as opposed to condemnation of, violence and injustice; some themes, such as inspiration or the power of nature, have significant interest quite apart from their relation to politics; and, finally, civilization and barbarism are far more obviously themes in almost all of the pendentives.

31. Hannoosh, Painting and the “Journal,” 130. On the theme of civilization in the Bourbon Library murals, see also Hannoosh, “Delacroix and the Ends of Civilizations,” in Kahng, Delacroix and the Matter of Finish, 83–87.

32. This last observation was first made to me by Daniel Guernsey.

33. On Vernet’s ceiling, see Beetem, “Horace Vernet’s Mural.” For a comparison to Delacroix’s ceiling in the Library of the Palais Bourbon, see Guernsey, Artist and the State, 110.

34. Hannoosh, Painting and the “Journal,” 342.

35. Lecomte, “Venise et Paris,” 29–30. Cited from Aubrun, Henri Lehmann, 197.

36. For the critical response, see Aubrun, Henri Lehmann, 197–98. For the comparison with Delacroix, see Hannoosh, Painting and the “Journal,” 134–35. For illustrations of Lehmann’s murals, see Vachon, Ancien Hôtel, 59–61, 66–67, 72–73, 76–78, and Calliat, Hôtel de Ville.

37. See Hannoosh, Painting and the “Journal,” 134–35.

38. Sloane, Paul Marc Joseph Chenavard, 122.

39. On Chenavard’s plans for the Pantheon and his ideas regarding history and civilization, see especially ibid., 24–134; Marie-Claude Chaudonneret, “Le décor inachevé,” in Chaudonneret, Paul Chenavard, 67–79; and Guernsey, Artist and the State, 149–89.

40. Still another set of murals that might be compared to those of Delacroix are Théodore Chassériau’s decorations for the Stairway of Honor at the Cour des comptes (1844–48, also destroyed). These were more innovative than Lehmann’s, but they, like Vernet’s, were clearly intended to suggest that the July Monarchy represented an unparalleled stage of civilization. Chassériau juxtaposed allegories of peace and war on the stairway’s largest walls, between which he placed a painting with personifications of force and order. While the painting devoted to war explored the conditions necessary to prepare successfully for battle, its counterpart showed the arts and agriculture thriving under peace. Other paintings in the complexly divided space portrayed justice and commerce, while subsidiary panels illustrated subjects related to the larger themes: warriors, harvesters, law, and traders, as well as silence, meditation, and study. The cycle had its idiosyncrasies—the painting of commerce used richly exotic imagery in a painting devoted to the benefits of trade between civilizations—but overall it employed unambiguous antitheses to celebrate the priorities of the state in contemporary France. On Chassériau’s murals, see Guégan, Pomarède, and Prat, Théodore Chassériau, 214–32; Peltre, Théodore Chassériau, 156–70; and Germer, Historizität und Autonomie, 227–327.

41. Gotlieb, Plight of Emulation.

42. Bloom, Anxiety of Influence.

43. Delacroix, “Des variations du beau,” in Écrits sur l’art, 48–49.

44. In a suggestive book (Tradition and Desire), Bryson has argued that the Bourbon Library ceiling proposes an alternative to the dominant understanding of tradition in the nineteenth century. For Bryson, Delacroix managed “the potentially crushing weight of tradition” by suggesting that creators in all ages are the same insofar as their originality arises out of a confrontation with a barbaric, uncivilized world:

________ 

By insisting on the primal substrate from which culture emerges, Delacroix locates a pre-cultural or “barbaric” past in relation to which all the founders of culture, even Orpheus, are latecomers. Temporal dislocation is made to seem the fate not only of the nineteenth-century painter, struggling to create an I out of an It, but of all the alleged primogenitors, of Culture itself.

    . . . This is to humanise the founding fathers, by perceiving them as identical (in their latecoming) to oneself; it democratises culture, since all men, no matter what age they are born into, must confront the pre-Orphic in their own way. (206)

________ 

Bryson fits Delacroix’s ceiling into a broadly psychoanalytical history of painting that charts the pull of tradition and desire on painters, but his observations nonetheless point to the distance Delacroix had moved from a view of civilization as the accumulation of achievements across the ages to an ongoing struggle with the primal aspects of man and nature.

45. Cited from Eisenman, Nineteenth Century Art, 9, whose interpretation I follow here. See also the discussion of this painting in Bryson, Tradition and Desire, 152–55.

46. S. Lichtenstein, Delacroix and Raphael, 188–203. For more of Delacroix’s possible sources, see Beetem, “Delacroix’s Lycurgus,” 16–17, and Hersey, “Delacroix Preparatory Drawing,” 13–14.

47. Beth Wright has written at length on Delacroix’s engagement with history earlier in his career, arguing he had a deep engagement with liberal historiography and pioneered an approach that fused “the spectator’s emotions and thoughts with those of a protagonist from another age” (Painting and History, 13). Wright notes that this new mode of history painting shared much with liberal historians: “describing mores rather than representing heroic actions, evoking social forces rather than focusing on a protagonists, invoking an empathetic response by the spectator to the psychic moment, a moment that fused past and present” (127). The episodes depicted in the ceiling of the Library of the Bourbon Palace might be considered to depart from this insofar as many focus on protagonists and some on heroic actions, but, as I argue here, for such a venue as a library, a surprising number do not, and in many respects Wright’s generalizations still apply to the ceiling. In any event, I am asserting that Delacroix maintained the same fascination with history as a creative enterprise that Wright identifies earlier in his career, even if not in precisely the same form.

48. Very much in the tradition of humanism and the Enlightenment, Delacroix valued the ability to generalize and to speculate about larger ideas and issues. His favorite authors—Montaigne, Voltaire, Montesquieu, Buffon—readily addressed questions across many fields and constantly invoked their own broad literary culture, especially the Greek and Roman classics. Delacroix lived in a day when academic disciplines were just beginning to crystallize out as separate, autonomous specializations, but he moved in the opposite direction. In this sense he belonged to his age, when a wide range of painters, writers, and historians looked upon the construction of the past as a creative, interdisciplinary enterprise, but his practice was even more characteristic of the previous century. As Lionel Gossman writes about Voltaire: “What was important was not the truth of the narrative so much as the activity of reflecting about the narrative, including that of reflecting about its truth. History, in the eighteenth century, raised questions and created conditions in which the individual subject, the critical reason, could exercise and assert its freedom. It did not assert itself as an objectively true and therefore compelling discovery of reality itself.” Gossman, Between History, 244. It was precisely the speculative, humanistic aspect of Voltaire’s thought that attracted Delacroix.

    Compare Wright, Painting and History, 126, on Delacroix’s belief that painting was “not fettered to objective representation” and “could be more evocative, expressive, and persuasive than a linear literary narrative.”

49. My account of the murals in the Luxembourg Palace draws primarily from Hannoosh, Painting and the “Journal,” 147–60; L. Johnson, Paintings, 5:87–114; and M. Sérullaz, Peintures murales, 85–109.

50. Hannoosh, “Alexandre et les poèmes.”

51. Each of these is traditionally associated with a historical figure, but in fact only one of them, Theology, is a portrait (of Saint Jerome). Nonetheless, their iconography has a few idiosyncrasies that reveal Delacroix’s authorship: the philosopher is engaged in natural history (again reflecting Delacroix’s passion for animals), and writing is again a common attribute in three of the pictures.

52. See especially Hannoosh, Painting and the “Journal,” 151–56.

53. See L. Johnson, Paintings, 5:92–96.

54. The dome still makes oblique references to the fragility of civilization and the struggle between civilization and barbarism in the framing of Dante and Homer by Achilles and Hannibal and in the figures of Cato the Younger and Marcus Aurelius, as Hannoosh explains in “Alexandre et les poèmes,” 428–31.

55. Delacroix, Correspondance générale, 2:120.

56. L. Johnson, Paintings, 5:89.

57. Zerner, “Raphaël, Ingres, et le romantisme,” 701.

58. For an excellent analysis of how the ceiling still explored the vicissitudes of civilization, see Hannoosh, Painting and the “Journal,” 147–58. For its emphasis on great men, see Hannoosh, “Delacroix and the Ends of Civilizations,” in Kahng, Delacroix and the Matter of Finish, 88.

59. L. Johnson, Paintings, 5:89.

60. Hannoosh, Painting and the “Journal,” 150–56.

61. Thoré, “Peintures de M. Eugène Delacroix,” cited from M. Sérullaz, Peintures murales, 101.

62. On the commission, see Caso, “Neuf lettres”; Rousseau, “ Commande”; and M. Sérullaz, Peintures murales, 111–27. On Delacroix’s evolving ideas for the painting and eventual solution, see A. Sérullaz, “Delacroix’s Ceiling Panel”; M. Sérullaz, Mémorial de l’exposition, 315–24; L. Johnson, Paintings, 5:115–31; and Vincent Pomarède, “Apollo Victorious over the Serpent Python,” in A. Sérullaz et al., Delacroix: The Late Work, 172–76.

63. The interpretation of the ceiling as an allegory of triumphant revolution arose as early as the first reviews: Vacquerie, “Apollon.” Most critics, however, did not elaborate on the painting’s allegorical significance. At least one writer, however, read it as a victory of science, intelligence, and progress over barbarism. Mirbel, “Artistes contemporains,” 119–22.

Clark, Absolute Bourgeois, 140, sees the painting as foreshadowing the coup d’état of Louis-Napoleon. Hesse, “Eugène Delacroix,” argues in contrast that a political reading of such a mythological subject was unlikely because few people thought of mythology in such terms. The general significance of the allegory at the time is explored in Matsche, “Delacroix als Deckenmaler.”

64. For example, he referred jokingly to the public that would view his picture as “Pythons of all ranks.” Delacroix, Correspondance générale, 3:82.

65. Drawings nos. 385 and 390 (inv. nos. RF37303 and RF11966) in M. Sérullaz, Dessins d’Eugène Delacroix, 1:193–95.

66. Hannoosh, Painting and the “Journal,” 164–65.

67. On the Apollo Gallery, see Bresc-Bautier, Galerie d’Apollon.

68. Delacroix, Correspondance générale, 3:36.

69. Ibid., 86.

70. As observed in ibid., 120.

71. M. Sérullaz, Peintures murales, 19.

72. As noted in ibid., 120–21.

73. L. Johnson, Paintings, 5:118. Johnson, in ibid., 119, has further demonstrated that the horses of Apollo’s chariot respond ingeniously to the overall program of the ceiling: each has a color associated with a different time of day, and each twists its body toward a different point in the sky in order to suggest the sun’s progress.

74. Delacroix, Nouvelles lettres, 67–68. Delacroix’s exact words are difficult to translate: “Je ne doute pas que votre imagination n’y ait encore ajouté. C’est au reste une des propriétés de la peinture d’ouvrir à la pensée une carrière plus libre ou au moins plus vague que ne fait la poésie : elle laisse à chacun, comme la musique, se faire sa part et penser à sa manière.”

75. For summaries of the critical reactions, see ibid., 122–26; A. Sérullaz, “Delacroix’s Ceiling Panel,” 189–93; and M. Sérullaz, Peintures murales, 138–44.

76. Michèle Hannoosh discovered a printed invitation to view the paintings in the Salon de la Paix, created by Delacroix and distributed to critics and friends. It definitively establishes the arrangement of the paintings in the room. See Johnson and Hannoosh, “Delacroix’s ‘Hercules Cycle.’”

77. Planche said, “M. Delacroix frankly accepted the subject that he had to treat.” Planche, Études, 219. His visit with Planche is documented in Delacroix, Correspondance générale, 3:181–82.

78. Clément de Ris, “Plafond de M. Delacroix,” 45.

79. Ibid., and Gautier, “Salon de la Paix.”

80. Gautier, “Salon de la Paix.” Planche, in “Apothéose de Napoléon,” 315, uses a very similar formulation. Curiously, in this same review Planche sees a “history of civilization” in the Hercules cycle, perhaps revealing just how much the theme of civilization was linked to monumental painting.

81. Planche, Études, 203–34.

82. Delacroix, Correspondance générale, 3:212. Delacroix implied that Planche shared this opinion in his review of the ceiling, but in fact Planche indicated no such thing.

83. L. Johnson, Paintings, 5:138.

84. Quotation from Planche, “Apothéose de Napoléon,” 315. See also du Pays, “Décorations de l’Hôtel,” and Petroz, “Plafonds.”

85. Delécluze, “Peintures de M. E. Delacroix.”

86. Clément de Ris, “Plafond de M. Delacroix,” 45.

87. Planche, “Apothéose de Napoléon,” 313–14.

88. Clément de Ris, “Plafond de M. Delacroix,” 45.

89. Planche, “Apothéose de Napoléon,” 319.

CHAPTER 3

1. See, for example, Alaoui, Delacroix in Morocco; Dumur, Delacroix et le Maroc; Arama, Maroc de Delacroix; and Lambert, Delacroix et “Les femmes.”

2. Said initially put forward his ideas in Orientalism. Important studies of Delacroix that incorporate Said’s ideas and sometimes revise them include Grigsby, “Orients and Colonies”; Porterfield, Allure of Empire, 117–42; and Harper, “Poetics and Politics.” For a recent essay that questions how thoroughly Delacroix’s drawings done in Morocco are characterized by Orientalist certainty and domination, see Fraser, “Images of Uncertainty.” There now exists a large literature critiquing Said’s work. For an excellent overview of the critical response to Said and of the continued relevance of Orientalism today, see Burke and Prochaska, “Introduction: Orientalism.” For a summary of the relevance of critical accounts of Orientalism for art history, see MacKenzie, Orientalism. Other critiques of Said’s argument that I have found useful include Lowe, Critical Terrains; Clifford, Predicament of Culture, 255–76; Porter, “Orientalism and Its Problems”; and Bhabha, Location of Culture, 66–92.

3. A point first made by Nochlin, Politics of Vision, 33–59.

4. To my knowledge, the history of the term “Orientalism” in nineteenth-century art criticism has not been systematically studied, but Roger Benjamin credits the critic Antoine Castagnary with introducing the term into art criticism in the 1860s. See R. Benjamin, Orientalist Aesthetics, 24–25.

5. Ibid., 6–7, 143–45.

6. Delacroix speaks of possible travel to Egypt and lessons in Arabic in his Journal, 144, 153.

7. Delacroix, Correspondance générale, 1:307.

8. Seven notebooks from the North African voyage were sold at the time of the artist’s death: see Catalogue de la vente, 77. At least five survive; three are preserved in the Louvre (Département des arts graphiques, inv. nos. RF 39050, RF 1712, and RF9154), and one in the Musée Condé, in Chantilly. On these notebooks, see, in addition to the sources in notes 1 and 2 above, Delacroix, Voyage au Maroc. In addition to extensive documentation and scholarship, this series includes facsimiles of the four surviving notebooks.

9. The ethnographic character of Delacroix’s sketches in Morocco has been much remarked upon. Among recent essays, see especially Fraser, “Images of Uncertainty,” and Lambertson, “Delacroix’s Sardanapalus.”

10. For a discussion of how the drawing explores the different postures of riders in Europe and North Africa, see Olmsted, “Reinventing the Protagonist,” 161–62.

11. For example, his sketches reveal a fondness for deeply shaded passageways, exotic architectural ornament, magnificent horses, and indolent figures. His notes record typically Orientalist observations: the inhabitants, to his mind, were fatalistic, content with their lot, habituated to despotic government. He obviously sought out subjects that held potential for his painting, and frequently noted down those that reminded him of his artistic models: two fighting horses were “the lightest and most fantastic thing that Gros and Rubens could have imagined” (203); someone’s head was like those of “the Moors of Rubens” (205); a sky was “slightly cloudy and azure à la Veronese” (227). Even Delacroix’s use of brighter colors in North Africa, often attributed to the unique optical phenomena of the sunny region, might be seen as a product of his expectation that the East would provide new or heightened sensual experiences or an emancipation of the senses. For more on these aspects of his Moroccan oeuvre, see Grigsby, “Orients and Colonies,” and Porterfield, Allure of Empire, 117–42.

12. Delacroix’s friend Charles Cournault reported that Victor Poirel, the chief engineer of the port of Algiers, arranged for Delacroix to visit the home of a porter. Cournault claims that Poirel “liked to recall” this story. See Cournault, “Galerie Poirel.” The story is repeated in Lambert, Delacroix et “Les femmes,” 10; Escholier, Delacroix et les femmes, 81–84; and Burty, “Eugène Delacroix,” 96. Escholier claims to have heard the story from Poirel himself. There is little documentation for the elaborate version of the visit offered by Burty.

13. Porterfield, Allure of Empire, 121–30, in particular insists on the ways in which the painting asserts its ethnographic knowledge while at the same time drawing on and elaborating existing conceptions of “the Orient,” especially its purported sensuality.

14. The ethnographic character of the painting has been noted in Pouillon, “Ombre de l’Islam.” Pouillon notes its exceptional (for the period) attention to religious practice as well as the ways in which it plays up the dramatic bodily movements of the participants. Consistent with the argument presented in this chapter, Pouillon notes that Delacroix’s initial attention to cultural specifics in this painting is much attenuated in a later version (Toronto, Art Gallery of Ontario).

15. For example, the religious sentiment portrayed in The Fanatics of Tangier is surely meant to appear irrational and overwrought. The Jewish Wedding revels in exotic costumes, architecture, dance, and musical instruments. Most of all, the Women of Algiers in Their Apartment depicts a subject that could hardly have answered more to the fantasies of Delacroix’s male audience. As Grigsby puts it, the painting “made available to every Frenchman a space previously under lock and key of the solitary Oriental despot, now disempowered” by the conquest of Algeria. Grigsby, “Orients and Colonies,” 79. It allowed viewers to penetrate into the most private of North African sites, to assume the power and privileges of the conqueror vicariously. The beautiful, indolent, passive female bodies are, like the colorful and ornate interior decorations, a delight for the eyes. They are bathed in a golden light, caressed by soft shadows, embedded in a painting whose luscious application of paint amplifies the sensuality of the subject itself. The black maid, who almost appears to draw back the curtain in order to reveal them, emphasizes their status as privileged, light-skinned objects of desire unveiled for viewers.

    The literature critiquing the Women of Algiers from an Orientalist perspective is now voluminous. In addition to Lambert, Harper, Porterfield, and Grigsby, see DelPlato, Multiple Wives, 50–56; Ma, “Real and Imaginary”; and Dorbani-Bouabdellah, Eugène Delacroix.

16. As noted in Grigsby, “Orients and Colonies,” 72. On fantasy and the Sardanapalus, see also Bohrer, Orientalism and Visual Culture, 54–60.

17. Porterfield, Allure of Empire, 138, insists on this aspect of the painting and notes that the genesis of the painting coincided with the coining of the word ethnographie in French and the opening of a Musée ethnographique in Paris in 1831.

18. As noted in Allard, “Delacroix et l’idée,” 38.

19. The article is Delacroix, “Une noce juive.” On the painting, see Ubl, “Eugène Delacroix’s Jewish Wedding,” and Grossman, “Real Meaning.”

20. Critics remarked on the fanciful quality of the late Moroccan work. For example, Théophile Gautier suggested that “we would be very suspicious of the authenticity of The Edge of the River Sebou if we didn’t know that the artist had actually made the trip to Morocco. It is difficult to recognize the African nature in this cabbage-green landscape, in these grassy banks, in these Arabs of the North, in this river similar to the Seine or the Marne, whose waters are disturbed by a few bathing kids.” Gautier, Exposition de 1859, 36. Paul Mantz referred to the same painting as “a luminous view, but a bit fanciful in its overly blue tonality.” Mantz, “Salon de 1859,” 137.

21. Delacroix, Correspondance générale, 1:329–30.

22. Ibid., 330.

23. Delacroix made similar remarks about a group of Native Americans visiting Paris with George Catlin in 1845, in which he was able to see antique forms and attitudes. See Beetem, “George Catlin.”

24. Delacroix, Correspondance générale, 1:314.

25. Ibid., 316–17.

26. Ibid., 332.

27. Ibid., 335.

28. Ibid., 336.

29. He notes further that no one had been executed in Morocco for seven years.

30. When the militias of the various regions entertained them with fantasias, or ceremonial military charges, Delacroix and his companions sometimes wondered if their lives were in danger. At one, a soldier broke from the performance and took a shot at de Mornay. Delacroix, Voyage au Maroc, 6:215. For a more detailed account of the hostility Delacroix encountered in Morocco and the fear it engendered in him, see Grigsby, “Orients and Colonies,” 75–78.

31. Delacroix, Correspondance générale, 1:326.

32. Ibid., 328.

33. The summary account I offer here of the early history of colonialism in French Algeria is based on the following sources: Ageron, Modern Algeria; Julien, Histoire de l’Algérie; Prochaska, Making Algeria; Ruedy, Modern Algeria; Lorcin, Imperial Identities; Sessions, By Sword; Robert-Guiard, Européennes; and Bouchène et al., Histoire de l’Algérie.

34. For a good summary of the tactics and the debates they stirred in France, see Sessions, By Sword, 83, 163–64. The writer and historian Assia Djebar played a major role in publicizing the existence of primary documents and forgotten published accounts that describe the barbaric acts of the French military. See Djebar, Fantasia.

35. General Sylvan Charles Valée to General Guingret, 19 May 1839, cited from Sessions, By Sword, 163.

36. Tocqueville, Writings of Empire, 70.

37. David Prochaska has argued that the concept of settler colonialism is key to understanding some of the distinctive characteristics of colonialism in Algeria, including the rapacious appetite of immigrants for land. See his Making Algeria, especially 6–11. For a good summary of the changes in Algerian society in this period, see Prochaska, “Other Algeria,” 121–24.

38. Almost immediately after conquest, French officials began to contemplate sending the poor and unemployed to Algeria, and in varying degrees did so over the course of the nineteenth century, despite the objections of administrators in the colony. The government actively encouraged the emigration of skilled and unskilled laborers, especially those with the capital to start farms and businesses. Enormous new construction projects in transportation infrastructure, communications, housing, and public buildings created a large market for labor.

39. Olmsted, “Sultan’s Authority.” For further observations about the painting that support Olmsted’s thesis, see Kahng, Delacroix and the Matter of Finish, 31–34.

40. Blanc, “À la veille,” cited from Olmsted, “Sultan’s Authority,” 83.

41. Houssaye, “Salon de 1845,” cited from Olmsted, “Sultan’s Authority,” 95.

42. On the role of military officers, see Bruller, Agérie romantique.

43. On Vernet’s paintings at Versailles, see especially Zarobell, Empire of Landscape, 34–36, 39–46.

44. On Dauzats and his Portes de Fer paintings, see ibid., 46–72.

45. See the most general survey of such prints, Esquer, Iconographie historique.

46. See also Pouillon, “Miroirs,” 64–68.

47. On Algerian Orientalist painting, see Zarobell, Empire of Landscape; De Delacroix à Renoir; Vidal-Bué, Algérie; Vidal-Bué, Alger et ses peintres; and Cherry, “Algeria.” A list of more-general works that devote significant attention to French Orientalist painting in Algeria would include Peltre, Orientalism in Art; Peltre, Orientalisme; Peltre, Atelier du voyage; Lemaire, Orient in Western Art; Rosenthal, Orientalism; Thornton, Orientalistes; Stevens, Orientalists; Picturing the Middle East; and R. Benjamin, Orientalism.

48. In the 1830s that number hovered around 2 percent of the total number of paintings, until in 1839 it rose to just over 3 percent. In the 1840s, except for two lean years, it fluctuated primarily between 3 and 4 percent. The year 1846 was the highpoint, with 4.86 percent of the paintings depicting Orientalist scenes. The total number of Orientalist canvases exhibited rose accordingly: the Salons of the 1830s had between 29 and 65 Orientalist paintings; those of the 1840s had between 30 and 192. Statistics drawn from Garnier-Pelle, Delacroix et l’aube, 154–67.

49. Zarobell, Empire of Landscape, 25–26. On Algerian Orientalism, see ibid., 63–73. On scientific studies, see Nordman, “Notion,” and Nordman, “Mission de savants.” Some of the early images of Algeria took as their model the illustrations for Baron Isidore Taylor’s Voyages pittoresques et romantiques dans l’ancienne France, a series of publications begun in the 1820s to document the various regions of France. Indeed, many artists who worked in Algeria had worked on the Voyages pittoresques, and they used similar titles for their own publications. Baron Taylor’s Voyages pittoresques had as one of its goals the unification of the French nation, even as it displayed the nation’s diversity. Similarly, images of Algeria inevitably helped to establish and consolidate the new French empire. Even as they produced the exotic, they suggested that Algeria was knowable and increasingly explored, part of a larger body of French and European knowledge, as did the many scientific studies that depicted Algeria’s geography, geology, skies, flora, and fauna. A work such as Jean-Charles Langlois’s enormous, detailed, and highly illusionistic panorama of Algiers, produced in 1833, could not but undercut the exoticism of its subject.

50. It is true that Delacroix painted primarily Morocco, not Algeria, but his paintings were seen as offering the same type of imagery, and as it happened, pictures of Morocco only became common after his death. Also, as already noted, he saw the colonization of Algeria as directly diminishing the interest of Moroccan subject matter. For an overview of paintings on Morocco, see Arama, Itinéraires marocains.

51. Gautier, Exposition de 1859, 38.

52. Galichon, “M. Gérôme.”

53. On the negative appraisal of Orientalism, especially among critics advocating realist tendencies in art in the 1860s and 1870s, see R. Benjamin, Oriental Aesthetics, 24–31. For examples in which these critics mock Orientalism, see Zola, Salons, 120–21; Duranty, “New Painting”; and Castagnary, Salons, 2:31–32, 248–50.

54. Font-Réaulx, “Souvenir du Maroc,” 30–33.

55. On Decamps, see Mosby, Alexandre-Gabriel Decamps.

56. After hearing from a friend that Decamps had difficulty working from the model and from nature, Delacroix remarked: “The independence of the imagination must be entire before the canvas. The living model, in comparison to that which you have created and put in harmony with the rest of your composition, throws off the mind and introduces a foreign element into the whole of the composition” (640). A few days later he compared him to Rembrandt, noting that both succeeded with a degree of exaggeration in their effects (640–41). Ethnography and accuracy had nothing to do with his appreciation of Decamps.

    Delacroix called Decamps’s Samson Turning the Millstone, in the Salon of 1847, “genius” (364). At the same time, Delacroix criticized Decamps for his exaggeration (1313), for his sole reliance on the imagination and his lack of draftsmanship (1333), and for his efforts to introduce a classicism into his figure drawing in his late work (1732).

57. The notion of exiting French culture and integrating into Algerian society is a major theme in Fromentin, Une année. On this aspect of Fromentin, see Pouillon, “Exotisme, modernisme,” 217–18, and Pouillon, “Miroirs,” 69–72.

58. Fromentin, Une année, 177–91.

59. Ibid., 186. Much of his discussion is a rather abstruse reflection on the difficulty of assimilating the “bizarre” forms of the landscape and daily life of Algeria to the conventions of European art and of finding a generalized beauty in particular observations, but one thing is clear: no amount of ethnography will make art.

60. Ibid., 187.

61. Ibid., 189–90.

62. Sketches that Fromentin executed in 1853 on the edge of the Sahara and at the farthest reach of his travels suggest that his interest in the Algerian landscape pushed his artistic practice toward new formal effects. For example, a sketch entitled Laghouat, 20 June, 9 o’clock (1853, private collection, La Roche sur Yon, France, illustrated in Zarobell, Empire of Landscape), presumably painted en plein air before the motif, disrupts the expected compositional order of a landscape, eliminating framing elements and any device that would guide the eye into the distance, from the foreground to the horizon. Fromentin simplifies the view, reducing it to large flat areas of unmodulated or barely modulated pigment applied thickly and dryly to the canvas. The painting relies on bold contrasts of color and value for its effects. The line of architectural ruins and rocks that separate the ground and sky are blocked in with broad strokes. Fromentin’s later practice often relied on stock motifs, generalized settings, and more-traditional compositional arrangements or simply repeated his earlier work, but he nonetheless retained a distinctive facture and unusual palette first explored in Algeria.

63. Nochlin, Politics of Vision, 41.

64. Ibid., 42.

65. Ibid., 44.

66. Allard, “Delacroix et l’idée,” 37–47.

67. Evident here is an attitude typical of colonial discourse and first studied by Bhabha, Location of Culture, 66–92, 129–38. For an important analysis of Bhabha’s discussion of ambivalence, see Young, White Mythologies, 141–56.

68. Delacroix, Journal, 1901.

69. Delacroix, Correspondance générale, 1:319, 328; Delacroix, Journal, 301, 304.

70. Ibid., 1022. See also ibid., 275.

71. Olmsted, “Reinventing the Protagonist,” 139–201.

72. See Delacroix, Journal, 220, 237, 316.

73. Ibid., 216, 220.

74. Ibid., 233, 316.

75. One might also include in this group the Arab Players (1848, Musée des beaux-arts, Tours) and The Sultan Abd er Rahman (1845, Musée des Augustins, Toulouse).

76. Delacroix seems to refer to this canvas in 1858 and indicates that it was based on a seascape seen in Dieppe. By the time it was finished, in 1860, it included the Moroccan dress and architectural details. See A. Sérullaz et al., Delacroix: The Late Work, 262, and Hannoosh’s comments in Delacroix, Journal, 1228 n. 63.

77. Achebe, “Image of Africa,” 788.

CHAPTER 4

1. I have drawn extensively from two dissertations on the subject: Finlay, “Animal Themes,” and Kliman, “Eugène Delacroix.” Kliman published a significant article based on her dissertation: “Delacroix’s Lions.” See also Sérullaz and Vignot, Bestiaire. On Delacroix’s study of animals as a student, see, in addition to Kliman, Lambertson, “Genesis of French Romanticism,” 47–48.

2. Following literary sources, he likened the features and posture of Guillaume de la Marck, known as the “Boar of the Ardennes,” in The Murder of the Bishop of Liège to those of a boar, and may have developed the pose and features of the protagonist in The Death of Sardanapalus from studies of wild cats, apparently in an effort to understand or make legible human passions. See Finlay, “Animal Themes,” 46–47, 54–55, and Kliman, “Delacroix’s Lions,” 454.

3. Kliman, “Delacroix’s Lions,” 458. See also D[orit] S[chäfer], “Mephisto stellt sich bei Frau Marthe vor,” in Eugène Delacroix (2003), 140.

4. On the collaboration between Delacroix and Barye, see Loffredo, “Recherches”; Lemaistre and Tupinier Barrillon, Griffe; L. Johnson, “Delacroix, Barye”; and Brugerolles et al., Antoine-Louis Barye.

5. Delacroix, Correspondance générale, 1:225.

6. For more on this comparison as well as the most complete account of the dates and nature of Delacroix’s drawing sessions at the Jardin des Plantes, see Laugée, “Ménagerie d’Eugène Delacroix.”

7. As noted in Kliman, “Delacroix’s Lions,” 457–58.

8. Taine, Nouveaux essais, 360.

9. Kliman, “Delacroix’s Lions,” 458–61.

10. For a study of the prevalence of the concept of the struggle for existence in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century European society, albeit one that emphasizes English sources, see Gale, “Darwin and the Concept.” De Beer, Streams of Culture, 35, 58, shows that the idea of a “struggle for existence” was “common property” in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, with William Paley, Erasmus Darwin, Charles Lyell, and Augustin Pyrame de Candolle all offering versions of it.

11. As early as 1885 Delacroix’s animal paintings were connected to Darwin. Alfred Robaut, Delacroix’s friend and the author of the first catalogue of his work, referred to one of his animal paintings as “an example of the fatalities of the combat for existence, or, as Darwin calls it, the struggle for life.” See Robaut, Calmettes, and Chesnau, Œuvre complète, 330.

12. For summaries, see Gale, “Darwin and the Concept,” and Donald, Picturing Animals, 79–81.

13. Donald, Picturing Animals, 76.

14. For other accounts of changing attitudes toward the natural world, see Ritvo, Animal Estate; Thomas, Man and the Natural World; and Farber, Finding Order.

15. For examples in which Delacroix emulates the naturalist, see Delacroix, Journal, 305, 510, and 1344.

16. For comments by Delacroix about Buffon, see ibid., 155, 328, 1125, 1299, 1355. In 1825 Delacroix went with Stendhal to Cuvier’s salon, and the same year he thanked Mme Cuvier for an unspecified service (Delacroix, Correspondance générale, 1:152–53). In an autobiographical account written late in his life, Delacroix mentions attending a number of salons in the years from 1825 to 1830, including ones at Cuvier’s home and at the Jardin des Plantes (Delacroix, Journal, 1746). Cuvier asked Delacroix to look for specimens for him in Morocco (ibid., 305). In 1853 Delacroix recollected some of Cuvier’s personal habits and his predilection for “petites filles” (ibid., 723). Delacroix asked Geoffroy for permission to sketch the lions at the Jardin des Plantes when, significantly, they were feeding (Correspondance générale, 2:83–84). For a summary of other known connections between Delacroix and Cuvier and Geoffroy, see Kliman, “Delacroix’s Lions,” 458–63.

17. The debate crystallized the key issues of the time in biology and natural history and set the terms for research for decades to come. Nothing less was at stake than the possibility of organic transformation and the relation of zoological forms, key questions that preceded that of the origin of species. Geoffroy proposed that a single “unity of plan” preceded the diversity of species, and focused on homologies between different species. He was interested in some of the same phenomena that led Charles Darwin to his theory of evolution, and indeed he was the first to use the term “evolution” in its modern, phylogenetic sense, in his 1831 Mémoire sur les sauriens de Caen. Cuvier opposed these ideas and explained the diversity of species largely through a functionalist, teleological account far more attuned to Darwin’s interest in biogeography. In contrast to Geoffroy’s speculative, philosophical theories, he offered a far more empirical and classificatory approach. For summaries of the Cuvier-Geoffroy debate, see Appel, Cuvier-Geoffroy Debate; Farber, Finding Order, 37–45; and Outram, Georges Cuvier, 111–17.

18. For a very useful summary of literary responses to the debate, see Appel, Cuvier-Geoffroy Debate, 175–201. See Finlay, “Animal Themes,” 8–9, for a consideration of Delacroix’s relationship to the debate, though one that portrays him as more engaged in the debate than I portray him here. The most thoroughgoing effort to link Delacroix’s art and thought to Geoffroy is in Kliman, “Delacroix’s Lions,” 462–63. Kliman convincingly argues that Delacroix’s interest in likening humans to felines would have predisposed him to Geoffroy’s ideas about a “unity of plan” in which all animals are composed of the same units of construction, and she cites a passage from the journal (Delacroix, Journal, 1344) that may be informed by Geoffroy’s ideas.

19. On English paintings of ferocious beasts, as well as a summary of the large literature on the subject, see Donald, Picturing Animals, 65–100. Delacroix knew Stubb’s pictures of lions attacking horses either directly, through prints, or through the intermediary Théodore Gericault, as discussed below. Delacroix executed similar subjects in a watercolor (Louvre, RF 6048) and a lithograph (Delteil 77). He was also familiar with the animal paintings by James Ward and probably with those by James Northcote, both of whom had explored the theme of predator-on-predator violence. On this subject, see Finlay, “Animal Themes,” 56–57, and Eugène Delacroix (2003), 187–200.

20. Potts, “Natural Order,” 20–21.

21. Donald, Picturing Animals, 77.

22. On Balzac’s Comédie humaine and animal imagery, see Finlay, “Animal Themes,” 72, and Blix, “Social Species.”

23. Finlay, “Animal Themes,” 115–17.

24. This shift—from thinking about competition between species to thinking about it within a species—corresponds to a broader development in evolutionary theory. Before Darwin (as well as after), natural historians conceived of the struggle for existence primarily as interspecific. One of the key insights that led Darwin to his theory of evolution was the importance of intraspecific competition. Malthus’s study of human population growth may have directed Darwin to intraspecific competition, but artists and writers had for some time been drawing analogies and allegories between intraspecific human competition and interspecific animal struggles. This is not to question the importance of Malthus for Darwin or to diminish Darwin’s brilliance in seeing the importance of intraspecific competition; it is only to note how many thinkers were moving between the animal and the human, the interspecific and the intraspecific.

25. Finlay, “Animal Themes,” 121–27.

26. On Delacroix’s motivations for recommencing his journal in 1847 and the differences between it and his early diary of the 1820s, see Hannoosh, Painting and the “Journal,” 55–68. She explores how the myriad species and forms in the natural history museum offered “rich testimony to worlds beyond his own” (57).

27. A few of his paintings clearly explore perverse passions in allegorical terms. For example, in Woman Bitten by a Tiger, of 1856 (Stuttgart, Staatsgalerie), the victim’s voluptuous body, revealing pose, and ambiguous expression invite viewers to consider her sexually and to conflate her suffering with passion. The tiger, which bites her breast, is easily imagined as a sexual aggressor and killer even as the drawing disavows this sadistic fantasy by embodying the aggression in the form of an animal. Similar erotically charged scenes of women devoured by wild felines were only too common in nineteenth-century art and literature. On this painting, see Finlay, “Eros and Sadism.” For similar scenes, see Finlay, “Animal Themes,” 97–101, 107. She observes that in 1849 Alexandre Dumas noted that “if the victim [of a lion] is a man, it is the generative organs that [the lion] eats first; if it is a woman, it is the breasts.”

28. Vincent Pomarède, “Felines and Hunts,” in A. Sérullaz et al., Delacroix: The Late Work, 78–79.

29. Of the fifty-five pictures of this type catalogued by Lee Johnson, at least ten were given as gifts to friends. Seven remained in Delacroix’s collection and were part of the posthumous sale. Nine are known to have been sold directly to dealers, though many others were in all likelihood sold either to dealers or directly to collectors. See L. Johnson, Paintings, 3:9–32, 269–72, 329, and L. Johnson, Paintings . . . Fourth Supplement, 9–10, 16–18.

30. For example, Delacroix gave a watercolor of two lions at rest to his lover and cousin Mme de Forget, and he gave a pastel of a lion and lioness for a charitable sale to benefit flood victims. See Sérullaz and Vignot, Bestiaire, 103. Also, on 6 March 1847 he gave a drawing as a donation to a charity lottery and may have done so again in 1851 (Delacroix, Journal, 360–61).

31. On the Exposition universelle de 1855 see Trapp, “Universal Exhibition”; Mainardi, Art and Politics, 33–120; Pointon, “From the Midst”; and Starcky and Chabanne, Napoléon III. On Delacroix’s contribution, see Jobert, Delacroix, 260–64.

32. Delacroix may have considered multiple compositions for the painting, even into August of 1854, before settling on the one used for the canvas in the Exposition universelle. In any case, the painting went through many changes. In his journal entry for 21 March 1854 he mentions working “on the compositions [in the plural] for the Lion Hunts” (740). On 27 April he mentions “turning over in [his] head the two paintings of lions for the exhibition” (758). In June he showed the canvas to Mercey and received criticisms, some of which struck Delacroix as “founded” (785). On 1 August he notes that on this day and the previous one he had his first two sessions working on the Lion Hunt and thinks the work will go fast (801). On 2 August he notes that it was his third day working on the Lion Hunt and that it was a “bad day” (801). Numerous drawings attest to the many changes his idea went through, and some of these may date from as late as August 1854, suggesting he was still considering radical changes. For the evolution of the painting, see L. Johnson, Paintings, 3:24–27, and Vincent Pomarède, “The Bordeaux Lion Hunt,” in A. Sérullaz et al., Delacroix: The Late Work, 97–100.

33. For a summary of the criticism, see Pomarède, “Bordeaux Lion Hunt,” in A. Sérullaz et al., Delacroix: The Late Work, 100–101.

34. Du Camp, Beaux-arts, 94.

35. Lee Johnson records six copies done during the 1820s. Most of the later copies are known only through his posthumous estate sale and are now lost, but Johnson records the existence of at least eleven of these later copies. See L. Johnson, Paintings, 1:13–17, 2:182–83, 3:3–5, 6:207.

36. On these drawings, see Kliman (“Delacroix’s Lions,” 454–58), who first noted the ways in which men are likened to animals.

37. On great exhibitions such as the world’s fair and the exposition universelle in general, see Greenhalgh, Ephemeral Vistas; Mattie, World’s Fairs; Andia, Expositions universelles; Gaillard, Paris; Meyer, Great Exhibitions; and Findling, Historical Dictionary.

38. Marx and Engels, Collected Works, 10:499–500. Walter Benjamin called such nineteenth-century exhibitions places “of pilgrimage to the commodity fetish.” See W. Benjamin, Arcades Project, 7.

39. For a particularly good analysis of the celebration of civilization and progress at the Great Exhibition, see Stocking, Victorian Anthropology, especially 1–6.

40. Panthéon de l’industrie, 1 and 118.

41. Claudin, Exposition à vol d’oiseau, 65, 70.

42. Du Camp, Beaux-arts, 405.

43. Gorges, Revue de l’exposition, 7.

44. Ibid., 75–76.

45. Claudin, Exposition à vol d’oiseau, 11.

46. Gaillard, Paris, 16.

47. Visites et études, 194.

48. Ibid., 195. Similarly, Gorges, Revue de l’exposition, 1, using language found in many other reviews, called the exhibition a “memorable battle of industry and art between all the civilized peoples of the globe.” This language was transferred, as much as was possible, to painting. One critic, for instance, said the fine-arts exhibition compared “the schools of all the civilized nations,” permitting artists to “walk down the path of progress.” Hédouin, Revue des principaux tableaux, 5. Even Etienne Delécluze, who, like Delacroix, normally belittled the rhetoric of progress, begrudgingly admitted that the exhibition marked a step forward: “The step that the civilized world has made since Lycurgus is not large, one has to admit: however, ideas of a broad peace have regularized and grown; and the best proof that you can give comes from the universal exhibitions of London, Dublin, and that which is open in Paris.” Delécluze, Beaux-arts, vii. Delacroix’s ceiling in the Bourbon Palace had also invoked Lycurgus in arguing that history is characterized by a constant back-and-forth between civilization and barbarism, not by steady progress.

49. See Hannoosh’s summary in Delacroix, Journal, 36–37.

50. Marx and Engels, Collected Works, 10:499–500.

51. Baratay and Hardouin-Fugier, Zoo, 71–146. On the London zoo in the nineteenth century, see Blunt, Ark in the Park.

52. Besides sketching regularly in the galleries and menagerie of the Museum of Natural History, he would almost certainly have seen at least some of the traveling menageries and animal shows that passed through Paris, including those of Henry Martin and James Carter. Martin’s show was so famous that it is hard to imagine Delacroix would have missed it. Delacroix sent tickets to his friend Pierret and Pierret’s wife to attend Carter’s show in 1840 but was unable to attend with them. Delacroix, Correspondance générale, 2:46–47.

53. Baratay and Hardouin-Fugier, Zoo, 173. Henry Martin’s enormously successful act, which first came to Paris in 1829, reached the zenith of its popularity with a pantomime in which he played a dethroned Indian nabob who regains his crown by fighting a series of ferocious creatures. In other parts of his show he appeared lying on the flank of a lioness and playing with a tiger. Isaac Van Amburgh was an American based in England who became famous for baiting and torturing his animals into a state of ferocity and then beating them back into submission. His career ended abruptly when in 1846 a tigress killed him in the middle of a performance. On traveling menageries and Martin, see ibid., 108–12, and Thétard, Dompteurs, 23–51. On Van Amburgh, see ibid., 52–73, and Lippincott and Blühm, Fierce Friends, 100–101.

54. Edwin Landseer depicted Isaac Van Amburgh lying down with a lamb amid lions and other big cats (fig. 68, Isaac Van Amburgh and His Animals, 1839, Royal Collection, Windsor Castle, London). George Stubbs painted a famous experiment designed to determine if a captive cheetah would attack an English stag (Cheetah with Two Indian Attendants and a Stag, 1764–65, City Art Gallery, Manchester). On such subjects, see Finlay, “Animal Themes,” 80. In France numerous popular prints depicted battles between lion tamers and their wards; one Philéad Salvator Levilly exhibited two lithographs of Martin with his cats, including one of him attacked by a lion, at the Salon of 1835. Important writers also worked with this material. Levilly’s prints are listed in Explication des ouvrages (1835), 246. None other than Honoré de Balzac, inspired by Henry Martin’s show, wrote a short story about a French soldier in Bonaparte’s army who, lost in the Egyptian desert, commences a passionate love affair with a panther. See his “Une passion dans le désert,” originally published in La revue de Paris, 24 December 1830.

55. Gérard began publishing articles chronicling his adventures in Algeria in 1838. On Gérard, see Bertrand, introduction to Gérard, Chasse au lion, 1–20; Gérard, Spahi traqueur de lions; and Gérard, Afrique du nord.

56. Gérard, Chasse au lion, 1.

57. Bertrand, introduction to Gérard, Chasse au lion, 9.

58. Gérard, Chasse au lion, 91.

59. Ibid., 11.

60. Ibid., 188–90.

61. Delacroix, Journal, 844. As Hannoosh points out in ibid., n. 448, Delacroix met Gérard in 1861, when the latter presented a plan to create a zoological park in the Bois de Boulogne to a commission of the Academy.

62. Johnson dates the earlier painting to 1849–50. See catalogue no. 180 in L. Johnson, Paintings, 3:14.

63. Gautier, “Exposition universelle.”

64. In conversation with the author.

CONCLUSION

1. On Delacroix’s understanding of the “vague,” his use of it elsewhere in his writing, and its sources in Senancour and de Staël, see Larue, Romantisme et mélancolie, 155–59, and Mras, Eugène Delacroix’s Theory, 104–5.

2. There is now substantial scholarship on Delacroix’s relationship to music. See especially Delacroix: The Music of Painting; Athanassoglou-Kallmyer, “Du goût”; Mras, Eugène Delacroix’s Theory, 33–45; Mras, “Ut Pictura Musica”; Regelski, “Music and Painting”; and Schawelka, Eugène Delacroix, 37–46. For an essay situating Delacroix among other examples of interchange between music and painting in the nineteenth century, see James H. Rubin and Olivia Mattis, “Musical Paintings and Colorful Sounds: The Imagery and Rhetoric of Musicality in the Romantic Age,” in Rubin and Mattis, Rival Sisters, 1–34.

3. Delacroix addressed such prejudices at length in 1857:

________ 

It is a gift or a fault of our race: the mind has to figure into everything. So that you see, if you like, a relative inferiority when it comes to painting. It is true painting lives especially from forms, from the exterior of objects, line, color, the effect, all conditions that have nothing in common with the idea of literature—I didn’t say with the idea of poetry, which is something else. This word “poetry,” which you have to use even when it is a question of painting, reveals the poverty of language that has brought confusion in the attributes, in the privileges of each of the fine arts.

    This word, being used to signify the quality par excellence of all the arts, and designating at the same time the art of painting with words, seems to indicate that this last art [literature] is art par excellence, as the dominant quality in the other arts is only in some way a loan that is made to it [sic]. (1181)

________ 

Further thoughts to this effect are found in Delacroix, Journal, 1796.

4. In the last two examples, Delacroix was talking about both painting and sculpture.

5. For more on the particular qualities of painting prized by Delacroix, see Mras, Eugène Delacroix’s Theory, 33–45. Mras demonstrates how many of Delacroix’s ideas on this matter have ample precedents in art theory from Leonardo up to Delacroix’s own time.

6. While necessarily brief, I hope this definition captures the essence of modernism as it is defined in art-historical works surveying the phenomenon—such as Harris, Writing Back; Frascina, Pollock and After; and Frascina and Harrison, Modern Art and Modernism—as well as in more-general accounts, such as Arcilla, Mediumism, and Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde.

7. T. J. Clark, “Clement Greenberg’s Theory of Art,” in Frascina, Pollock and After, 55.

8. On the similarity of his ideas to those of de Piles, de Staël, and Stendhal, see Thomas Lederballe, “Delacroix’s Enthusiasm: Abduction as Genre in His Painting,” in Delacroix: The Music of Painting, 103–11; for a comparison to these and other earlier thinkers, see Mras, Eugène Delacroix’s Theory, 39–42.

9. For some intriguing thoughts along these lines, see Gossman, Between History, 3–6.

10. T. J. Clark notes, “Books about modernism tend to go in for inaugural dates. It all began in the 1820s, they say, or with Courbet setting up his booth outside the Exposition Universelle in 1855, or the year Madame Bovary and Les Fleurs du Mal were put on trial, or in room M of the Salon des Refusés.” Clark, Farewell, 15. The phenomenon appears early on. Mallarmé characterized Impressionism as follows: “In extremely civilized epochs the following necessity becomes a matter of course, the development of art and thought having nearly reached their far limits—art and thought are obliged to retrace their own footsteps, and to return to their ideal source, which never corresponds with their real beginnings.” He cites Courbet as an important early artist for the new school but emphasizes that it really begins with Manet and his followers. He ends his essay with the words of an imaginary Impressionist painter who emphasizes the suddenness with which the new art was realized: “when rudely thrown at the close of an epoch of dreams in front of reality, I have taken from it only that which properly belongs to my art.” Mallarmé, “Impressionists,” 34. One important theorist of modernism who has argued that it has a much longer and more gradual genesis is Michael Fried, especially in his Absorption and Theatricality.

11. Athanassoglou-Kallmyer, “Cézanne and Delacroix’s Posthumous Reputation.”

12. McWilliam, “Action française.”

APPENDIX

1. Staël, Corinne, ou l’Italie, 302.

2. Cuvier, Histoire des sciences, 136–39.

3. Diderot and Alembert, Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné, 213.

4. See also Polybius, General History; Plutarch, “Life of Marcellus” 19; Valerius Maximus, Memorable Doings and Sayings 8.7; Pliny the Elder (A.D. 23–79), Natural History VII.125; Cicero, Against Verres II.4.131; and Cicero, On Ends (De Finibus) V.50.

5. Delacroix read the passage in Thierry, “Revue littéraire.” He clipped out the passage, marked it up, and inserted it into his journal. See Delacroix, Journal, 1139–47.

6. In an early plan for the ceiling, Delacroix refers to “Hérodote chez les prêtres égyptiens,” leading some scholars to identify the Magians with Egyptian priests. Angrand, “Genèse des travaux,” 317. Herodotus reserves the word “Magians” for Persian priests only. He does, however, interview Egyptian priests extensively in book 2 in order to understand the customs of Egypt, but he notes that they shave their heads. Herodotus, Histories 2.36. Delacroix thus appears to have considered both subjects as possibilities for the ceiling. The attributes of the exotic figures in the pendentive are vaguely Egyptian, suggesting the possibility that Delacroix conflated the two subjects.

7. M. Sérullaz, Peintures murales, 67.

8. Hannoosh, Painting and the “Journal,” 146.

9. Angrand, “Genèse des travaux,” 316.

10. Waerden, “Heliocentric System.”

11. Buffon, Époques, 209, 254.

12. Hopmans, “Delacroix’s Decorations,” 266.

13. As noted in L. Johnson, Paintings, 5:64.

14. Two drawings in the Louvre reveal the development of his thoughts. In one (inv. no. RF9397) there are no scrolls, while in a second (inv. no. RF9401) there is one scroll, in the hand of the centurion.

15. Hannoosh, Painting and the “Journal,” 139.

16. Plato, Apology, trans. Harold North Fowler, in Plato in Twelve Volumes, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann, 1966), 40a.

17. Plato, Symposium, trans. W. R. M. Lamb, in Plato in Twelve Volumes, vol. 3 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann, 1991), 201–3.

18. Plutarch, “On the Sign of Socrates.”

19. Montaigne, “Apology for Raymond Sebond,” in Complete Essays of Montaigne, 417.

20. Plutarch’s Lives 4.1–2, trans. Bernadotte Perrin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press; London: William Heinemann, 1914).

21. Reproduced as no. 35 in Eugène Delacroix à l’Assemblée nationale, 127.

22. These ideas occur individually in numerous documents. They are grouped together in various combinations in a drawing in the Louvre (inv. no. RF9935) and in a manuscript now in the Getty Research Institute (call no. 860470, sheet 3).

23. Delacroix’s description, cited from Angrand, “Genèse des travaux,” 67. Plutarch mentions two separate visits to the oracle, one at the beginning of his rule and the other at its end. In neither does he specifically mention the priestess.

24. For further analysis of the subject and of another version of the painting, see Beetem, “Delacroix’s Lycurgus.”

25. Plutarch’s Lives 1.1, 2.1.

26. See M. Sérullaz, Dessins d’Eugène Delacroix, nos. 271–303 (inv. nos. RF3713, RF9403, and RF9414).

27. Delacroix, Œuvres littéraires, 1:119–20.

28. The subjects are listed in the margins of a drawing in the Library of the Assemblée nationale. Louis de Planet also states that Delacroix was developing the Saint Paul narrative. Joubin, “Souvenirs de Louis,” 430.

29. As emphasized in Hannoosh, “Alexandre et les poèmes,” 423–24.

30. In Statius’s account, the infant Achilles eats lion entrails and the bowels of a half-slain she-wolf. Achilles goes on to describe Chiron’s instruction: “he taught me to go with him through pathless deserts, dragging me on with mighty stride, and to laugh at the sight of the wild beasts, nor tremble at the shattering of rocks by rushing torrents or at the silence of the lonely forest. Already at that time weapons were in my hand and quivers on my shoulders, the love of steel grew apace within me, and my skin was hardened by much sun and frost; nor were my limbs weakened by soft couches, but I shared the hard rock with my master’s mighty frame.” Statius, Achilleid II.102–9, trans. J. H. Mozley, Theoi Classical Texts Library, http://www.theoi.com/Text/StatiusAchilleid1B.html.

31. From Hesiod, Theogony, trans. Glenn W. Most (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006).

32. Already in Delacroix’s own day, the famous translator and scholar Jean-Baptiste Dugas-Montbel argued that Homer was not a historical personage, but a fiction, and that the Iliad and the Odyssey were in fact compilations of the poems and narratives of an ancient Greek people. As evidence for his argument, he made reference to the story of Alexander’s preserving the poems of Homer. See Dugas-Montbel, Histoire des poésies. It is certain that Delacroix was aware of Dugas-Montbel, because he noted down his name (incorrectly spelled “Dugast-Montbel”) on the sheet of ideas for the Palais Bourbon Library now in the Getty Research Institute (call no. 860470, sheet 3v).

33. Moreau-Nélaton, Delacroix raconté, 2:16.

34. Horace, Art of Poetry, lines 391–401. On the relation to Horace, see Hersey, “Delacroix Preparatory Drawing,” 11.

35. Moreau-Nélaton, Delacroix raconté, 2:259.

36. Hannoosh, Painting and the “Journal,” 137.