678. Eugène Delacroix (1798-1863), French,

Léon Riesener, 1835. Oil on canvas, 54 x 44 cm.

Musée du Louvre, Paris. Romanticism.

 

 

Eugène Delacroix

(1798 Charenton-Saint-Maurice – 1863 Paris)

 

Delacroix was one of the greatest painters of the nineteenth century, in the sense of one who thinks and feels and expresses himself by means of colour and sees them, in his mind’s, eye as a composition. From there, he begins defining the whole into its parts in order to work out the separate details of form.

He nurtured himself upon the works of the colourists in the Louvre, especially upon Rubens. Indirectly it came out of the heart of the Romantic movement which had spread over Europe. Delacroix was inspired by the writers Goethe, Scott, Byron, and Victor Hugo. His own romantic nature flamed up through contact with theirs; he was possessed with their souls and became the first of the Romantic painters. He took many of his subjects from the poets of his preference, not to translate into literal illustrations, but to make them express in his own language of painting the most agitated emotions of the human heart.