Categories: French Culture, French History
This episode features our frequent and very popular guest Elyse Rivin. If you enjoy her episodes, please consider supporting her on Patreon.
If you've been to the Louvre, you've probably seen Liberty Leading the People: the bare-breasted woman we now call Marianne, holding the French flag, flanked by revolutionaries, including the young boy Victor Hugo later turned into Gavroche in Les Misérables. What you may not know is that the man who painted it spent most of his career being torn apart by critics. In episode 606 of the podcast, Elyse Rivin and I look at the life of Eugène Delacroix, and it's quite a story.
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A good family, then nothing
Delacroix was born in 1798 near Paris into a well-connected family. His father had been a member of the Convention during the Revolution, then an ambassador and Préfet in Bordeaux. But he died when Eugène was seven, and his widow discovered he'd left enormous debts. Eugène and his mother moved in with his married sister on the Left Bank, and he attended the Lycée Louis-le-Grand. Family connections got him into a private atelier, then the École des Beaux-Arts, where he met the man who shaped him most: Théodore Géricault, the painter of The Raft of the Medusa. Géricault told him to paint what he was passionate about, use strong contrasts, and choose colors for emotion. Unheard of at the time.
"Smudges. That's all."
Eugène Delacroix submitted his first paintings to the Salon at 24, scenes from Dante's Inferno. They sold, thanks to his connections, but the critics tore them apart. And they kept at it for decades. Visible brushstrokes, no one-point perspective, wrong subjects. One critic wrote of his work: "It's smudges. That's all. This painting is an error. It should never have been made." Another sniffed that he "should cultivate a taste for Racine rather than for Shakespeare." Only a few defenders never wavered, among them Adolphe Thiers and Baudelaire, who called him a genius from the start.
Then came the July Revolution of 1830. Delacroix wasn't a Republican, he was friendly with Louis-Philippe, but he sympathized with the people in the streets. The result was Liberty Leading the People, an immediate success. It was also considered so powerful that a few years later, when social unrest was brewing, the painting was returned to his studio and hidden away. It didn't enter the Louvre until 1874.
Seven months that changed everything
In 1832, Delacroix paid his own way to accompany a diplomatic mission to Morocco and Algeria. Seven months there changed his work for the rest of his life. He filled nine notebooks with sketches, painted hundreds of watercolors, and brought back textiles, carpets, and costumes. Over 65 paintings came out of that trip, including Femmes d'Alger dans leur appartement, and it launched the movement we now call Orientalism.
Where to see Eugène Delacroix in Paris
Start at the Louvre for Liberty Leading the People and The Death of Sardanapalus. Then go to Saint-Sulpice: walk in, turn right, and the last chapel by the back entrance holds his final major works, finished as his health was failing. His house at 6 rue de Furstemberg, just off the lovely Place de Furstemberg, is now the Musée national Eugène-Delacroix. Fair warning: you won't see many major works there, it's more about standing where he worked. And if you visit Père Lachaise, he's buried there, next to Jenny Le Guillou, the woman who ran his household for 28 years and held his hand when he died.
Listen to episode 606 for the full conversation. Elyse tells this story better than any museum placard.
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TranscriptCategories: French Culture, French History