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Ferdinand Victor Eugene Delacroix
(Apr. 26,1798 Charenton-Saint-Maurice, Fr.- Aug. 13,1863 Paris) French Oil Painting Artist Biography.
Ferdinand Victor Eugene Delacroix is numbered among the greatest and most influential of French oil painters. One of the pivotal figures of the French Romantic movement, Delacroix was a master of historical and literary subjects on a small and large scale. His remarkable use of color was later to influence Impressionist oil painters and even modern artists such as Pablo Picasso, for these accomplishments he is one of the worlds artist.
Ferdinand Victor Eugene Delacroix was born in 1798. In 1815 he became the pupil of the French painter Pierre-Narcisse Guerin and began a career that would produce more than 850 paintings and great numbers of drawings, murals, and other works. The style of his first master, Guérin, bridged the developments of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, by the time Delacroix entered his studio, he had already demonstrated his own susceptibility to Romantic impulses. Delacroix broke away from the highly finished technique of his master early on and his bold use of color, his delicate but fluid brush and intense palette set him apart from almost all his contemporaries. In 1822 Delacroix submitted his first oil painting to the important Paris Salon exhibition, Dante and Virgil in Hell. A technique used in this work, many unblended colors forming what at a distance looks like a unified whole, would later be used by the impressionists. His next Salon entry was in 1824, Massacre at Chios. With great vividness of color and strong emotion, it pictured an incident in which 20,000 Greeks were killed by Turks on the island of Chios. The French government purchased it for 6,000 Francs.
Impressed by the techniques of English painters such as John Constable, Delacroix visited England in 1825. His tours of the galleries, visits to the theater and observations of English culture in general made a lasting impression upon him. Between 1827 and 1832 Delacroix seemed to produce one masterpiece after another. He again used historical themes in The Battle of Nancy and The Battle of Poitiers. The poetry of Lord Byron inspired a painting for the 1827 Salon, Death of Sardanapalus. The French revolution of 1830 inspired the famous Liberty Guiding the People, which was the last of Delacroix's paintings that truly embodied the romantic ideal. He found new inspiration on a trip to Morocco in 1832. The ancient, proud and exotic culture moved him to write "I am quite overwhelmed by what I have seen." In 1833 Delacroix painted a group of murals for the king's chamber at the Palais Bourbon.
His grandest Arab scene is the Sultan of Morocco and His Entourage, commissioned by the state in 1845 and sent to the Musée des Augustins in Toulouse where it remains. Although Delacroix had witnessed the scene portrayed on his 1832 Moroccan trip, it had taken place in a more modest setting. Here the artist has placed the Sultan before the walls of the city of Meknes, adding to the grandeur of the scene.
The later Arab scenes with landscape backgrounds were suffused with dazzling colors, emerald greens, brilliant yellows, liquid blacks and rich blues that served to emphasize the white robes of the Arab horsemen and figures which populate them, and attracted the attention of the Salon critics. It is not to his contemporary experience that he looked at this time, but back to his Moroccan journey years earlier, a journey that evidently remained as vivid in his mind as when he had first traveled there. His diaries and sketchbooks provide ample evidence of the effect this had on his art and even in his last great North African subject, Arabs Skirmishing in the Mountains (1863, National Gallery, Washington) he has masterfully employed this experience to great advantage.
He also continued doing his mural paintings, including panels for the Louvre and for the Museum of History at Versailles, until 1861. Much of the architectural painting involved long hours on uncomfortable scaffolding in drafty buildings and his health suffered. He died 1863, in Paris. His apartment was made into a museum in his memory.
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Liberty Guiding the People
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Sultan of Morocco and His Entourage
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Arabs Skirmishing in the Mountains
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Girl Seated in a Cemetery
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The Fanatics of Tangier
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