Delacroix

Rating:
Summary: The fellowship of the colors
Review: We are lucky that so much of DELACROIX's art is still around, lightly spread throughout the world: the only lost works are "Cardinal Richelieu saying mass" during the sack of the Palais Royal in 1848, the decoration of the Salon de la Paix at the Paris Hotel de Ville during the Commune, and "Justinian drafting his laws" during the fire at the Conseil d'Etat in the Palais d'Orsay in 1871. Taken in by anything new that the paint suppliers were selling, DELACROIX made bad choices in canvas and paints: the Romantic "Battle of Nancy," the Classical "Boissy d'Anglas at the National Convention," and the exotic "Moroccan chieftain receiving tribute" suffered from using bitumen, just as "Barque of Dante" has from going over fresh spots. Yet he thought of painting as storytelling with the richly vigorous colors of Peter Paul Rubens and of Paolo Veronese's "St Barnabas healing the sick." He was the only great Western artist to leave masses of manuscripts, as journals, letters and published articles, so we can walk our way through his sketches and writings to the finished products of the master colorist of people, landscapes, buildings, and animals: "Louis-Auguste Schwiter" standing, as his only full-length portrait, inspired by Thomas Gainsborough and Joshua Reynolds; "Charles de Verninac," in two Thomas Lawrence-style expressive bust portraits, with a carefully worked face, large brushstrokes, sketchy background clothes, and subtly agreeing colors; and his last, "Alfred Bruyas," with a Hamlet-like head melancholic, meditative and languid in a harmony of greens, browns and blacks. He was also a master landscapist of few painted landscapes, such as "Banks of the river Sebou," his only salon-shown landscape; "Sea at Dieppe," Impressionist in subject and technique; and "Still life with lobsters," with John Constable-type smooth varnish obviously brushstroked and with a David Wilkie-type lobster right out of "Chelsea prisoners reading the gazette of the battle of Waterloo." But most of his landscapes backgrounded his historytellings, such as "Natchez" and "Ovid among the Scythians": his history style of adding expressiveness and framing scenes was Richard Parkes Bonington-like in being more entertaining and picturesque than heroic, such as in "Henri III at the deathbed of his favorite mistress, Marie de Cleves" and with "Henri IV courting Gabrielle d'Estrees" and in seeming neartransparent watercolor-like by varnish made with copal, such as in the richly colored "Charles VI and Odette de Champdivers" and "Louis d'Orleans showing his mistress Odette de Champdivers." His building decorations harmonized balanced colors with finely drafted figures while getting architecture, light and paint to work together: at the Palais du Luxembourg's cupola harmonious light and vigorous colors dealt with the architecture by background landscape in blues and greens, central sky cloud-filled, and figures fleshtoned against bright reds, blues, greens, ochers, oranges, and whites; and at the Salon du Roi half-domes lighted figures clustered on the bottom as well as the landscapes and skies topwards in intense blues and greens. My sculptress mother used to say, and my artist sister keeps on saying, that artists see the world first in blacks and whites, with perfect examples in the DELACROIX tigers, lions, and horses changed into blacks, grays, and whites particularly showing color mastery. In fact, the author describes these animals as Romanticized in character and power by the very play of color and matter: Theodore Gericault- and Antoine-Jean Gros-influenced "Wild horse," as my special favorite; "Tam O'Shanter" rapidly brushstroked into a horizontally elongated horse, rider and witch in the "Derby at Epsom" style of Gericault; and "Royal tiger" and "Lion of the Atlas," as his two most successful lithographs, along with the dramatically white counterpointed "Macbeth and the witches" lithograph haloing the former and turning the latter into "phantoms of obscurity." So Barthelemy Jobert's is the book to read, in this beautifully clear, masterful English translation: he owns up to only talking about fitting DELACROIX into what went before, and I wish that he would write a sequel fitting the artist into what came after. Any readers looking for comparison reading might find helpful and interesting DELACROIX: THE LATE WORK, Loys Delteil's EUGENE DELACROIX, EUGENE DELACROIX: SELECTED LETTERS, 1813-1863, Michele Hannoosh's PAINTING AND THE JOURNAL OF EUGENE DELACROIX, Lee Johnson's DELACROIX PASTELS, and Editor Beth Segal Wright's THE CAMBRIDGE COMPANION TO DELACROIX.