Light and Heat

Eugene Delacroix, the bicentennial of whose birth falls this year, is often associated with his close friend Theodore Gericault, who painted “The Raft of the Medusa”; with George Sand, with whom he enjoyed a warm friendship; and with two paintings in particular: “Liberty Leading the People” and “Scenes from the Massacres of Chios.” But the general impression thus created, of a fiery and radical artist, is very much modified by this splendid new biography. Rumored to be the illegitimate son of Talleyrand--a rumor Barthelemy Jobert effectively lays to rest--and patronized by Talleyrand’s natural successor, Adolph Thiers, Delacroix was whispered about because of the deft manner in which he negotiated French cultural and political society. Far from being a revolutionary (one of his more orthodox works, “Cardinal Richelieu Saying Mass,” was actually put to the torch by rioters during the rebellion of 1848), he preserved a careful detachment from all “schools” and always tempered his Romanticism with a fealty to the classical style. It is true that he devoted himself to the Greek war of independence, as did many young idealists of the time. “Scenes from the Massacres of Chios” was in some ways the “Guernica” of its day. But his fellow-feeling for Lord Byron arose as much as anything from a literary and social Anglophilia, which he did much to promote in fashionable Parisian circles.

One term that is always subliminally associated with Delacroix is that slightly condescending word “lush.” His vivid colors, unfettered eroticism and candid use of the undraped lend tone to the label, which in turn is inescapably linked to that “Orientalism” which helped make him famous. Unusually at home, for a Frenchman, in the foggy and insular habitat of England (he was an admirer of Turner and Constable), Delacroix found in North Africa an extraordinary setting for his extremely fertile--another word that seems to go naturally with “lush”--imagination. Among the Jews and Berbers and Arabs of Morocco, he devoted himself almost journalistically to illustrating how things really looked, how details mattered and how rich and various was this partial domain of France. The light and heat of the Maghreb and the shade of its cloistered interiors brought out the finest in Delacroix and evoked moans of praise from his peers. Of the celebrated painting “Women of Algiers in Their Apartment,” Cezanne exclaimed: “We are all there in this Delacroix. When I speak of the joy of color for color’s sake, this is what I mean. These pale pinks, these stuffy cushions, this slipper, all this limpidity, I don’t know how, it enters your eye like a glass of wine going down your throat.”

The same light and heat are available in palpably different ways in Delacroix’s more classical compositions, most famously “The Death of Sardanapalus” (which was inspired by a Byronic passage). It should probably be said that he employed the exotic energy derived from his Orientalism to refresh and invigorate more traditional styles, and his celebrated journals, as well as this beautiful book, give evidence for that rather happy proposition.