Eugène Delacroix

The enfant terrible of the 19th century French Romantic school, Eugène Delacroix’s riotous history scenes, depictions of north Africa and animal studies manifest the movement’s concerns with emotion, exoticism and the sublime. Unlike his rival, the Neoclassicist Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, who turned towards antiquity, Delacroix instead drew on the art of Rubens and Veronese, eschewing cool and controlled work in favour of vivid colour laid down with agitated brushwork, which gave his pictures a pulsating sense of drama and dynamism. His prodigious draughtsmanship was matched by a wild imagination that took cues from the era’s literary figures, whilst his energised hand and eye for the fantastical laid foundations for the Impressionists and Symbolists.

Delacroix was born in Saint-Maurice in 1798. After a lukewarm salon debut showing Barque of Dante in 1822, he exploded onto the scene two years later with The Massacres of Chios, which the poet Charles Baudelaire described as ‘a terrifying hymn in honour of doom and irremediable suffering.’ The government’s purchase of the work funded a trip to England, where the artist absorbed the work of the Romantic poet Lord Byron.

Back in France Delacroix began creating sensuous nudes and writhing battle scenes, culminating in 1827 with the colossal, orgiastic Death of Sardanapalus. The picture’s audacity cost him his official favour, only to regain it in 1830 when he was awarded the Legion of Honour for painting the rousing Liberty Leading the People.

In 1832 the artist travelled to North Africa, filling sketchbooks with scenes of Arab life. The trip heralded the beginning of his later, mature style; quieter and more restrained. After returning to Paris he completed several monumental commissions, including decorative schemes for the Salon du Roi and library in the Palais Bourbon, the library of the Senate in the Luxembourg Palace and the Galerie d’Apollon in the Louvre. No other artist of the period was offered such triumph in public.

In 1855, more than 30 of his works were displayed at the Universal Exposition. In 1857 he was finally elected — after six failed attempts — to the Paris Academy. Prone to bronchial infections, he spent the last part of his life nursed by his housekeeper at a cottage in rural Champrosay. He died in Paris in 1863, aged 65.