Eugène Delacroix was born on 26 April 1798 at Charenton-Saint-Maurice in Île-de-France, near Paris. His mother was the daughter of the cabinet-maker Jean-François Oeben and it is believed his father, Charles-François Delacroix, was infertile at the time of Eugène’s conception and that his real father was the great diplomat Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord, who was a friend of the family and successor of Charles Delacroix as Minister of Foreign Affairs. It was said the artist resembled Talleyrand in both appearance and character. Throughout his career as a painter, Delacroix was protected by Talleyrand, who served successively the Restoration and King Louis-Philippe and worked as ambassador of France in Great Britain. Delacroix’s presumed father, Charles Delacroix, died in 1805 and his mother followed in 1814, leaving 16-year-old Eugène an orphan.
Delacroix’s early education was at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand, followed by enrolment at the Lycée Pierre Corneille in Rouen, where he steeped himself in the classics and won awards for drawing. In 1815 he began his training with Pierre-Narcisse Guérin in the neoclassical style of Jacques-Louis David. His early works reveal the influence of the more colourful and rich style of the Flemish painter Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640) and fellow French artist Théodore Géricault (1791–1824), whose works introduced him to the themes of Romanticism.
The following plate, Mademoiselle Rose, completed between 1817–1824 presents a female nude, depicted from the side, seated on a wooden pedestal, half covered with a piece of red material. Her left foot rests on a wooden block, while her head is turned towards the artist and is seen full face, adopting a somewhat awkward studio pose. The sitter has been identified as an artists’ model, who according to Alfred Robaut, Delacroix’s biographer, posed several times for Delacroix and for Richard Parkes Bonington, and who perhaps ‘distributed her favours impartially between the two artists’. In a letter to his friend Pierret, usually dated 1820, Delacroix wrote:
“I had tried to persuade Felix (Guillemardet) to come and join us tomorrow, but he said that the shortage of money had got the better of Mademoiselle Rose’s bottom on this occasion.”
The sitter’s timid attitude and anxious expression help to establish a sense of naturalistic simplicity, with no decorative arrangement. Although the canvas already experiments with the variations of light on flesh that were to preoccupy the artist later in his career, the pigment, applied in tentative touches in a granular impasto, has not yet acquired the fluidity which was to owe to the influence of English painting. Delacroix first witnessed this technique at the Salon of 1824, when he saw works by John Constable, including The Hay Wain, inspiring him to make a three month visit to London to study the works of the developing English school of art.