Delacroix: Leading Light of the French Romantic Movement.

• Author: Miller, Peter B.

The artist formed the link between the traditions of the past and modernism, ultimately having a profound impact upon the Impressionists.

Throughout the career of Romantic painter Eugene Delacroix, his expressive use of color, dynamic compositions, and stirring subjects drawn from literature and contemporary events provoked his critics and endeared him to his champions. Despite the occasional controversy surrounding his submissions to the Paris Salon, an annual government-sponsored art exhibition, Delacroix, born in 1798, built a reputation as one of the foremost French artists of the 19th century. An exponent of a style that made free use of vibrant colors, Delacroix was the lifelong rival of neoclassical painter Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, who advocated a more traditional linear style.

The works produced during the final 15 years of Delacroix's prodigious career are exemplary of his spontaneous painterly style, whereby specific details were subordinated to over-all emotional and visual effect. His late paintings demonstrate perhaps better than his large-scale Salon works those qualities of his art that later artists such as Edouard Manet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Paul Cezanne, and Paul Gauguin admired most. While Delacroix's late works stem from his continued interest in signature subjects--animal hunts, North African motifs, the Greek War of Independence, and scenes from the works of his favorite writers--it is the assurance of his style, mastery of the painted surface, and manipulation of color that had the greatest impact on subsequent painters. With his public reputation more or less secure by 1848--although election to the Institute de France, an important honor for a 19th-century French artist, eluded him until 1857--Delacroix's late works reveal a highly introspective and self-conscious artist consumed by a desire to fine-tune his technique and stake out his place in history.

The period from 1848 to his death in 1863 is marked by several curious contradictions in Delacroix's life and art. He was an urban sophisticate, yet he declared that he felt more comfortable at his country house at Champrosay, near Fontainbleau. While he was an ardent student of nature who executed carefully observed studies of plants and animals, Delacroix insisted that the artist should give free reign to the imagination, even if it meant taking liberties with scientific fact. Raised in a secular milieu and steeped in the writings of Enlightenment...