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Eugene Delacroix
(1798-1863)
Eugène (Ferdinand Victor) Delacroix was born on April 26, 1798, at Charenton-Saint Maurice, and he studied under the French painter Pierre Guérin.
| He was trained in the formal neoclassical style of the
French painter Jacques-Louis David, but he was strongly influenced by
the more colorful, opulent style of such earlier masters as the Flemish
painter Peter Paul Rubens and the Italian painter Paolo Veronese.
He also absorbed the spirit of his contemporary and countryman Théodore Géricault, whose early works exemplify the violent action, love of liberty, and budding romanticism of the turbulent post-Napoleonic period.
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France 1963. Jacob's Fight with the Angel.
Mali 1968. Flower painting by Delacroix.
France 1998. Crusaders entering Constantinople, issued for the bicentenary of his birth.
Delacroix's most overly Romantic and perhaps most influential work is Liberty Leading the People (1830, Louvre), a semi-allegorical glorification of the idea of liberty. This painting confirmed the clear division between the Romantic style of painting, which emphasized colour and spirit, and the concurrent Neo-Classical style (in the development of which Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres was a leading figure), which emphasized line and cool detachment.
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France 1999. Liberty Leading the People (painted 1830). The stamp is cut from the presentation booklet for PhilexFrance '99. Click here to see the full painting. The link will open in a new window.
France 1982. Fragment of Liberty Leading the People, used for the huge French definitive series, started in 1982, and extending over 1987, 1988, and 1990.
France 1995. National Assembly. Part of the Liberty-painting is included in the design of this stamp, in the middle between the columns of the Assembly Building, as if Liberty is behind bars.
Some visitors to this page have asked me why the artist has chosen to show Liberty revealing her breasts. It is a well-known artist's technique to show a rebel moving upstream, against the wind, towards the final power. In the case of Liberty, this is shown by her half-torn clothing, indicating that she has been -- and still is -- struggling for the liberty of the people she leads, and that she is now on her way to power, which will finally cause the opposed government to fall, and institute a democratic regime [republic]. A true Romanticist artist vision :-)
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Delacroix remained the dominant French Romantic painter throughout his life. A trip to North Africa in 1832 provided subjects for more than 100 sensuous canvases. In addition, he received many government commissions for murals and ceiling paintings, as well as he illustrated various works of William Shakespeare, Sir Walter Scott, and Goethe.
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Eugene Delacroix has also appeared on French banknotes.
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France 1987. Bank note of 100 FF, with Delacroix's portrait on both the front and the back side. On the front side (left) is further a fragment of his "Liberty-painting". Pick # 154c. The watermark that shines through is a bust of Delacroix.
An interesting interpretation of Delacroix's famous painting "Liberty Leading the People" is found in the Irish artist Robert Ballagh's lithographs. Robert Ballagh (*1943) is considered Ireland's most important modern painter. Mr. David Scott wrote in the Irish Stamp News, Summer 1991:
Ballagh's stamps are perhaps most interesting and original when they pick up or adapt motifs or preoccupations of his work as an artist. The 1977 design commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Electricity Supply Board, based on a mural by Ballagh, may not be the best example of this, but the stamp celebrating the centenary of the birth of Padraig Pearse two years later (1979) merits detailed attention.
Ballagh's concern in the late 1960s with political issues, in particular that of violence and terrorism -- in Northern Ireland and abroad -- was reflected in a remarkable series of paintings that reproduced in starkly simplified forms scenes of insurrection or violence from classic masterpieces of European painting: David's "The Rape of the Sabine Women", Goya's "Third of May", Delacroix's "Liberty Leading the People". These works reappeared as a series of lithographs in the early 1970's.
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One of them, based on Delacroix's "Liberty" became the basis of Ballagh's Pearse-commemorative of 1979. In this striking design, the Parisian barricade has been replaced by the GPO, O'Connell Street, the headquarters of the 1916 rebellion, the self-portrait of Delacroix being substituted by the profile of Padraig Pearse.
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Most significantly, Ballagh has substituted the Irish for the French tricolour, thus in effect inscribing the Irish aspiration to nationhood into a long European tradition.
Sources:
Microsoft Encarta 2002.
Irish Stamp News, Summer 1991 (David Scott).
Acknowledgements:
Many thanks to Mr. Yves Arvis (France), Mr. Didier Cuidet
(France), Mr. Dominique Stéphan (France), Mr. Daniel Mourrain
(France), and Rodney Cork (Australia) for all help and research.
Banknote images by courtesy of Ron
Wise (USA).
More romanticist artists on this site:
Francisco Goya (including the painting "Third of May").
Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux (French Sculptor)
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| Revised 24-jul-2006. Ann Mette Heindorff Copyright © 1999-2007. All Rights Reserved |
![Delacroix. Ireland 1979. Robert Ballagh: Patrick Pearse [Padraig Mac Piarais] Leading the People.](delacroix-eire1979-RobBallagh-Piarais-medium.jpg)