Eugène Delacroix

France·1798-1863

Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863) was the towering figure of French Romanticism, working in Paris after early training with Pierre-Narcisse Guérin. Rejecting the cool precision of Ingres and Neoclassicism, he drew instead on Rubens and the Venetian masters, building his pictures from colour, movement and dramatic light rather than careful outline. His major works, from The Barque of Dante and The Massacre at Chios to The Death of Sardanapalus and Liberty Leading the People, fused literary sources—Byron, Scott, Shakespeare, Goethe—with contemporary events in Greece and France, provoking as much controversy as admiration. He also produced a large body of religious painting, mural decoration, and fine lithographs. A gifted colourist whose broken, expressive brushwork anticipated Impressionism and whose exoticism fed into Symbolism, Delacroix was made Commander of the Legion of Honour and remains one of the last of the old masters, with paintings now held in major collections from the Louvre to the Hermitage and the Metropolitan Museum.