Table of Contents for this Episode
Categories: French Culture, French History
[00:00:00]
Annie: This is Join Us in France, episode 606, six cent six.
Bonjour, I’m Annie Sargent, and Join Us in France is the podcast where we take a conversational journey through the beauty, culture, and flavors of France.
Today on the podcast: a Brief Biography of Eugène Delacroix
Annie: Today, I bring you a conversation with Elyse Rivin of Toulouse Guided Walks about Eugène Delacroix, the painter behind Liberty Leading the People, which features a bare-breasted woman we now call Marianne holding a French flag.
She’s flanked by revolutionaries, including a young boy we now call, you remember? Gavroche. That name came from Les Misérables by Victor Hugo.
Critics tore Delacroix’s work apart [00:01:00] for decades, and yet he kept painting his way, and I for one am glad.
We talk about his life, his trip to Morocco, and where to see his work in Paris from the Louvre to Saint-Sulpice.
Podcast supporters
Annie: Before we start, this show runs on listener support. If you want to work with me directly, I do itinerary consults. I have written eight tours of Paris on the VoiceMap app, and I do day trips around the southwest of France.
Everything is at joinusinfrance.com/boutique, and if you shop on Amazon anyway, starting at joinusinfrance.com/amazon costs you nothing, but helps the show.
Magazine segment
Annie: There will not be a magazine part of the podcast today because my conversation with Elyse about Delacroix ran long, but I have a short update about the Bastille Day fireworks for those of you who are in Paris this week.
The big fireworks show at the Eiffel Tower will not be on July 14th. [00:02:00] Instead, it will take place on the evening of July 13th, so just one day after this episode releases.
The City of Paris moved the event by one day to let everyone focus on remembering the 10th anniversary of the Nice terrorist attack of July 14th, 2016, which claimed the lives of 86 people and injured hundreds more.
I published a special episode when this happened because one of my listeners, Steve Stegman, was there with his daughter Sarah and reported about it. It was episode 116S of the podcast. Tomorrow’s fireworks promises to be spectacular.
This year’s show will feature 1,600 drones up from 1,000 last year, creating a synchronized display of lights and pyrotechnic effects above the Eiffel Tower.
The program will include 12 themed sequences celebrating the 400th anniversary of the French [00:03:00] Navy, the 70th anniversary of the sister city relationship between Paris and Rome, and of course, the Seine River itself.
So if you’re in Paris this week, make sure you adjust your plans, head to the Champ de Mars or another good viewing spot on July 13th, because that’s when you’ll see one of the biggest fireworks and drone shows in Europe.
I also want to thank one new patron this week, Shanna, who is brand new as a patron. And to join this wonderful community of Francophiles, go to patreon.com/joinus.
And to support Elyse, go to patreon.com/elysart.
Next week on the podcast
Annie: Next week on the podcast, an episode about an art retreat in Burgundy.
And for right now, let’s talk about Delacroix.
[00:04:00]
Meet Delacroix
Annie: Bonjour, Elyse.
Elyse: Bonjour, Annie.
Annie: We have a very exciting recording today because we’re going to talk about something that I know not very much about, but that I like a lot.
Elyse: Ah.
Annie: See, I… So this is Delacroix.
Elyse: The painter.
Annie: The painter. Eugène Delacroix, which I enjoy his work, but I really don’t know that much about him. So this is yippee. I get to learn…
Elyse: This is yippee?
Annie: Yeah, I get to learn about Delacroix, so this is great.
Elyse: Mr. Eugène Delacroix. Well, very interesting, very interesting person.
I knew of some stuff about his painting. I certainly knew a lot about certain paintings that he’d done. But I must say that delving into the story of his life and his personality was really fascinating, and it really helps understand… honestly, for people who are interested in [00:05:00] painting and in art, and for many, many, many of our listeners who of course go to Orsay, which is the great museum of 19th century painting, but that specifically really is impressionist and post-impressionist more than anything else, Eugène Delacroix is the person that basically announced the beginning of all of this. And a lot of people, I think, know about him, like I know you do, because of the one very enormously famous painting, Liberty Leading the People…
Annie: That’s right.
Elyse: … which is in the Louvre.
Annie: Right. A lot of his stuff is in the Louvre.
Elyse: A lot of his stuff is in the Louvre.
Romanticism Without Boxes
Elyse: He’s not considered to be an impressionist painter. He actually, which one of the things I found out doing all of the research for this, is that he’s really sort of a, like in a one-man category, that he was classified at first as a Romantic painter. That is with a big R, and that’s like, oh my God, I don’t even think I want to try and explain what that is.
But basically, [00:06:00] it has to do with a certain attitude towards the subject matter that you paint, and the way you paint. And that was one of the most important movements at the very beginning of the 19th century, and there were several people who were in that movement who were really the first leaders of doing landscape painting. So that was kind of like an offshoot of this period of romanticism, which is a whole philosophy. It’s part of German philosophy too, about nature and about things from the past. He was first labeled as a Romantic painter, but he himself, who was very vocal and wrote a lot, and published essays and things like that, he said, “I refuse this category. I am not a Romantic painter. Don’t put me in a box.”
My impression of him is that all his life, his main thing was, “Don’t put me in a box. I am who I am. I do what I do. My artistic education was not a typical one, and therefore you either like my stuff or you don’t,” basically, you know?
Annie: I [00:07:00] think a lot of people do.
Elyse: A lot of people do, yeah.
Annie: I think he’s easy on the eyes, and also he made these giant, historical pieces, like paintings about historical stories or just lifestyle of people.
And I just think it’s easy to look at this and start thinking about what does this mean? What… You know, and people get it. I don’t know, it’s hard to put my finger on it.
Critics and Controversy
Elyse: Well, his work is, I think, extremely hard to define in a certain kind of way because a lot of… It’s interesting because you can find a lot of the things he said and wrote about his own work because he was extremely criticized all during his career.
And that was one of the things I did not know ahead of time, that he was… And this is why I put it as part of my little title, the moody painter. He was really someone who had a whole pack of art critics, and at the time, art critics had far more influence than, on society [00:08:00] than they do today, that attacked him and said his work was basically garbage.
I have a couple of quotes later on you just won’t believe. And you have to have a lot of determination to keep on working in the face of that kind of criticism. Luckily for him, he had two or three people who were pretty steadfast in supporting his work and writing about it. But he had to fight back against what were basically preconceived ideas of what painting should be. And then towards the end of his life, the irony is that his work kind of went back to what it had been at the beginning, and that was at the time in the 1860s when people were moving on really into impressionism, things like that.
His major period of production that’s really important starts when he’s in his early 20s and really ends by the time he’s about 50. Let’s put it that way. I mean, afterwards, there are pieces he did, and I’ll mention where some of them are.
But he began young and became controversial young. So let’s talk [00:09:00] about what happened to him.
Annie: Very good. Yes, yes.
Early Life and Family
Elyse: So he was born in 1798 in a… somewhere north of Paris. It wasn’t very far from Paris, and into a very nice, very upper class family. He wasn’t nobility or anything like that, but he came from a very well-connected family. His father had been a member of the convention during the Revolution. He was actually sent as an ambassador for a while to other countries. His mother came from a family of ebenists, and I was, just realized this morning that the word in English it’s hard to translate because we don’t have… In English, it’s cabinet maker, which doesn’t indicate the quality of what an ebenist is, you see. You know?
Annie: Yeah, an ebenist is going to make like very delicate pieces like a beautiful chest, table or a beautiful piece of furniture that you display because it’s a piece of art almost.
Elyse: Yeah. And so his family, his mom’s [00:10:00] family, they were descendant of the ebeniste from Louis XV and Louis XVI, so they had connection.
Annie: Well, and the name itself, Delacroix, or of the cross.
Elyse: Yes.
Annie: It’s all in one word, but it kind of has this really kind of, I don’t know, of… classy name, right?
Elyse: Yeah. Yeah. There’s no indication that he was ever a member of the nobility as such, but his family was up there. You know, they were…
So the irony is, though, is he was the youngest of four children. And his father, who had had a very distinguished life and career, part of the convention during the Revolution, he was made an ambassador, he was then made Préfet in Bordeaux. He died suddenly when Eugène Delacroix was very, very young. He was seven years old. He was the youngest of a bunch of four children. In fact, he was the only boy. He had three sisters.
What happened was that his mother discovered, and I don’t know the details, that his father was in debt. Had enormous amounts of debt.
Which [00:11:00] was, I guess at the time, if the father has debt, the mother can’t do anything. I have no idea what the… you know, legally how that worked, you know.
Annie: Well, there were already very few protections for widows and their young children. I mean, if he was seven, okay, he was the youngest, so maybe his siblings were 15 or something.
Elyse: His older sister was already married, in fact. I don’t know.
Annie: But still, like, it would’ve been so hard to lose your husband and then find out that instead of an inheritance, there’s debt.
Elyse: Exactly. And apparently it was a shock, and there was a lot of debt. They don’t really go into detail in the articles that talk about him.
But what happened was, because his… He was a lot younger than his sisters, he and his mom, had to leave the house that they were in, and they went to Paris to live with his oldest sister, he was very close to, who was by that time married to someone who was of the same upper class, and who invited them to come and live with them. And it was basically on the Left [00:12:00] Bank, somewhere on the Left Bank, somewhere in the Sixth arrondissement.
I was trying to figure out if at that point there would’ve been arrondissement. I’m not even… Yes, I guess so because of Napoleon.
School Music and Art
Elyse: Anyway, so he goes to live with them, and he’s lucky because his brother-in-law is very kind and sets him up so that he can go to one of the best high schools in the area, which is Louis-le-Grand, which is the famous one that’s right behind the Panthéon, in fact, up on the hill.
And his mother notices that he has extremely, he has an extreme talent for everything musical. He loves music. He loves to sing. He apparently could even write some music, and she was actually encouraging him to go into a musical career. And at the same time, he was sketching and drawing, and loved decoration. Which is very interesting. I put this in bold in my notes because I really wanted to be able to say this. I just note because people may realize this but not think about it, that at that time, this was 200 years ago, basically, a little [00:13:00] more than 200 years ago, it was perfectly respectable for someone from an upper class family to go into the arts.
Annie: Sure, yeah.
Elyse: And for a man to do that was not considered, “Oh my God, how’s he going to make a living?” Or, you know, “Why is he doing this?” You know.
Annie: Well, people were buying a lot of art.
Elyse: Yes.
Annie: They were buying, they were commissioning pieces, and they were… You needed artists to do up a pretty house for you.
Elyse: And in fact, that is pretty much what happened because he decided himself that he was… He had an excellent education. He spoke several languages. He was very much interested in all kinds of cultural things and intellectual things. He himself decided that he was more interested in art than in music, although music was basically something that was a passion for him to go to and listen to all his life.
It was thanks to his uncle, his mother’s brother, that he got into a private art school, which [00:14:00] would’ve been called an atelier, with one of the artists that was well-known at the time, a man named Guérin. I didn’t even bother to look up his work, to be honest, but he was someone who was really well-known at the time.
But of course, these were paying private atelier, and the point of being sent to an atelier was that you learned. You learned technique, you learned lessons, however the artist taught, usually by copying the artist’s work. But also, in the private atelier, you really had lessons in perspective, you had lessons in anatomy. You had all this kind of stuff. But what happened was that eventually it became too expensive.
Annie: Oh.
Beaux Arts and Géricault
Elyse: And because his work was relatively good, he was allowed to enter into what is still there, which is the Beaux Arts de Paris.
Annie: So L’École des Beaux-Arts.
Elyse: L’École des Beaux-Arts, which now, today, is the hardest and most exclusive art school in France to get into, but which at the time was not considered to be as good as going to a private atelier run by a [00:15:00] specific artist. So it’s kind of ironic when you think about it.
Annie: Interesting, yeah.
Elyse: But what happens is that there he meets someone who has a huge effect on him, and that is the artist Géricault.
Annie: Aha, yes, another favorite of mine.
Elyse: Another favorite of yours, I know, of who, of course, did The Raft of the Medusa, his famous, wonderful, absolutely wonderful painting that’s in the Louvre.
And Théodore Géricault is seven years older than him, and he is a wild card. He’s someone who also comes from a relatively upper-class family, but who is kind of a wild man.
I mean, Eugène Delacroix was someone who was much more, it seemed to me, an intellectual and an aesthete. He liked women, he liked opera, he liked all this kind of stuff, but he was not out of his mind, you know?
And Géricault was. I mean, he was like one of these people, he didn’t just burn the candle at both ends, he burned the middle at the same time, you know?
Annie: Wow.
Elyse: He was really out there. But one of the things that happened is that his [00:16:00] ideas greatly influenced Delacroix because they really became very good friends. Since Delacroix didn’t have older brothers, he kind of became like his older brother figure.
And his ideas about art and subject matter for art, and even the way to paint, really influenced Delacroix even much later on in his life. So that is, all of this is before he’s 18.
Annie: Mm, okay.
Elyse: So we’re… we’re talking when he’s really still quite young, you know? He goes into the art school, and he stays there for four years. I don’t know if there’s any official diploma.
Decorative Arts Hustle
Elyse: But interestingly enough, and this is why his career is such a strange career compared to the way we imagine things today, is that because of all of his family connections, and because he did immediately show a taste for doing decorative arts, to help pay for his art school and just for living, while he was in the art school, he started getting jobs through family and connections to [00:17:00] decorate people’s homes.
Annie: Aha, yeah.
Elyse: And it turns out that he was very good at it.
Annie: So, like, he would create a mural for a bedroom or something?
Elyse: But not even just, he would do decorative elements. Like, he could do furnishings, and he would… He wound up doing some work for theater design. He wound up doing a little bit of costume design.
He was really into the decorative arts altogether, which is really interesting. In other words, for him, and it’s interesting because I personally think that way too, there was no difference between gorgeous fabric, beautiful costumes, and a painting. It was all art for him.
Annie: Mm-hmm.
Elyse: And it sounds like what happened was he was just a natural. That is, he took to doing all this stuff. He got jobs even doing illustration for technical things. I mean, he tried his hand at all of this stuff.
Annie: I mean, he wasn’t weaving cloth?
Elyse: No. No, no.
Annie: He would just draw designs that would go on cloth?
Elyse: He would design or he would set up a [00:18:00] space, just like I know because I did it myself, and if you want to do theater design, you have to have an idea of the space, of how it looks from a distance, of what colors to use, what fabrics to use. You know, you wind up using all of this stuff.
Annie: I see, so sets type of things.
Elyse: Set design, but also painting some walls and doing decorative elements around doorways, molding, you know? I mean, you can imagine 1700s houses and 1800s houses.
Annie: Yeah, they went all out. And you can tell, some of the fancy houses you visit, some of them, I visited one in the Basque Country, that he had hired, clearly, a lot of very good painters and decorators, yeah.
Elyse: He actually developed a kind of background, a real foundation in all of these things.
Copying Masters and Technique
Elyse: However, and he talks about this later because he writes about this, when he was criticized by some of the artists later on when he finally showed paintings, he said that part of it… It wasn’t an excuse, he was just explaining. He said [00:19:00] his background was such that he had never learned certain basic, what he called fundamentals, which was he never had classes in perspective. He never had classes in fine anatomical drawing. He was basically left on his own to do a lot of these things. And in the end, of course, it makes his work what it is, which is fabulous, but at the time, nobody could understand why he didn’t do straightforward one-point perspective, why he didn’t do the kind of classical horizontal lines to show space, which was what the neoclassical artists were doing at the time, taking things back from Renaissance and saying, “Okay, well, I can show you how I do space and all this.”
He says he was taught to copy, and it’s interesting because it makes me laugh because, of course, you and I both know, and I’m sure anybody who’s been to the Louvre has seen people who are copyists, you know, now.
Annie: It’s a very important way to learn anything, really.
If you want to learn the guitar, well, go on YouTube and watch the [00:20:00] people who… I mean, whose songs you like, how do they play them, and try it. Yeah.
Elyse: There’s a quote from him saying, “Copying, copying, copying. All I did basically for four years was copy, copy, copy.” But when you copy, and you really do copy, and you paint, and you understand the colors that are used, the techniques that are used. He developed a passion for the Flemish artists, so he loved Rubens and Rembrandt.
Annie: And he didn’t go copying easy things.
Elyse: No, he didn’t copy easy things. But notice, I mean, Rembrandt and Rubens are both artists, of course, Dutch artists, and from a little bit earlier time period, but whose work is extremely what I call painterly to…
And to explain, you know, the concept is that you see the paint, you see the brushstroke, you see the hand of the artist working on it, it’s not photographic. It doesn’t look photographic. There’s emotion in the painting, and this is what he saw, and this is what he wanted.
But he was up [00:21:00] against a pack of art critics who at this particular time didn’t think that this is what you were supposed to do with painting.
Annie: Oh, so they didn’t like seeing the brush strokes?
Elyse: No.
Annie: Oh.
Elyse: And they didn’t like the idea that he wasn’t following… This was the very beginning of the 19th century, which is how afterwards you get this real break with that when you get a second half of the 19th century with impressionist artists who created a far greater scandal than he ever did, except for Liberty, because they did something that you weren’t supposed to do.
You weren’t supposed to show your personal tendencies, your personal taste. You were supposed to do what was in the books. Basically, that’s what you were supposed to do.
And he said, you know, later on, he actually had problems with the quality of the paint of some of his bigger paintings that he had to go back and redo because he’d… He said, “One of the few things that I’m sorry I didn’t learn was how to [00:22:00] carefully mix paints and the chemistry of paint,” which is very technical, and it’s a very, very, very technical thing to think about when, you know, at the beginning of the 19th century, people were still mixing and making their own paints.
Annie: Right, because if you don’t know how, like, you’re going to end up with a mess.
Elyse: Well, what happens is more that it starts to flake off, or it starts to get yellow. You don’t know.
Annie: Or the oils come out where you don’t want them to or something. Yeah.
Elyse: So exactly.
Annie: Right.
Elyse: But he went sort of head-on into being an artist, and that was just the way it was. So he said, “I know that I could do mural work, and I know that I could do decorative work. But what I wanted was to do these beautiful pieces on canvas that would attract the critics and be talked about.” He knew what he wanted, and of course, he tried. Okay? He also was extremely lucky because even though he had to work to make money, his connections helped him all his life.
Annie: Right. [00:23:00] Right.
Elyse: He really had very good connections, you know.
Annie: Well, yeah, when you know rich people, you know, they’re going to make su… You know, “I know this guy who does really nice work. Why don’t you have him over or something?” Yeah.
Elyse: Exactly.
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England Influence and Color
Elyse: And then another thing that happened, and this is interesting too, at the Beaux-Arts, he met some young other artists, a couple of whom had just come back from a long stay in England, and he was very much an Anglophile. He knew how to speak English. He loved literature, and he developed this absolute passion for Shakespeare, and he developed a passion for everything English in terms of art.
Annie: Interesting.
Elyse: Isn’t that interesting? He hadn’t yet gone to England, because eventually, a little bit later, just a little bit later, he actually does, but not even for a very long time. But thanks to these new friends, he was introduced to various English artists who were working at the time, who introduced him to two things, watercolor technique, which was considered to be [00:24:00] very respectable and admired in England and was not at that time, particularly in France.
Annie: Okay.
Elyse: And landscape painters like Constable, whose work is based on bucolic scenes but who master color in using, in the sky and in things like that.
He was very interested in how to use color in an emotional way.
Annie: Uh-huh. Yeah. Well, Constable, yeah, it’s very dramatic.
Elyse: It’s very dramatic, and of course, he was eventually considered to be one of the masters of skies because he was able to, you know, create those skies. So this is basically, this is Delacroix in the beginning of his 20s, you know.
Salon Debut Dante Scandal
Elyse: He decides that it’s time for him to submit some work to one of these Salons. And the Salons were basically the way you became known in France.
Annie: Oh, yeah, it was huge.
Elyse: I mean, I don’t honestly know if this is true for other countries. I have no idea. But if you submitted work to one of the official [00:25:00] Salons, this is when the critics take a look at your work. It’s either good, or it’s not good.
Annie: Right, and just the fact that they would show your piece if you were accepted into the Salon was huge because then lots and lots of people would see it and would have a chance to ask, “Who is this brilliant new person?”
Elyse: And of course, as you mentioned, this is a time when there was a burgeoning middle class and an upper class that was very much interested in having artwork and having paintings and having their houses decorated by famous artists. And we’re not yet at the Salon des Refusés, which comes a lot later, more than a generation later.
This is still a period of time when everything’s rather staid, you know, in terms of… And what are the typical subject matters for paintings? Well, it’s still historical scenes. It’s still mythological scenes. Women, none… Don’t even mention because it’s either portraits or flowers in a bowl, you know. This is what it is. So we’re still into this period of time when this is a thing.
So what does he do? He takes his particular [00:26:00] personal aesthetic, he kind of says, “Okay, I’m going to do subject matter that should be the kind that would interest these art critics,” but he doesn’t take mythological scenes. For whatever reason, he decides to take two scenes that represent basically imagery from Dante’s Inferno.
Annie: Okay, right.
Elyse: Now, to be quite honest, for us today, for me, I’m not sure why these particular subject matters would be considered to be, “Oh my God, why did he do that?” Because it just to me is the same as doing anything mythological, you know?
But that is exactly what happened. And what he showed… he showed two paintings. One’s called La Barque de Dante, and the other is called Dante et Virgile aux Enfers.
Annie: Okay.
Elyse: Because of his good connections, they were bought.
They were bought by somebody official from the… This is at the time of the restoration. This is Charles X, okay? [00:27:00] So they were bought, not for the price he wanted, but still they were bought. But even though they were bought, the critics tore them apart.
Annie: Mm.
Elyse: And this time they tore them apart, not specifically because of the way he was painting, but like, “Why would you paint a painting about this?” Well, you know, I don’t know. I mean, it sounds like they were just pretty stuck up about what you could paint and what you couldn’t paint at the time. But he had to defend himself.
He’s 24 years old, and from this point on, for the rest of his life until his last few years, every time he makes a painting, he has to defend it. Every single time. You know, it’s really hard to imagine that it was that hard, you know?
Annie: Yeah, yeah. While you were talking, you mentioned that women were still painting portraits and flowers and things, and it occurred to me, when was Rosa Bonheur?
Elyse: A little bit later.
Annie: A little bit later, that’s right. She was born in ’22, and he was born [00:28:00] in 1798.
Elyse: Right.
Annie: So, you know, 25 years difference.
Elyse: She’s one generation later.
Annie: Yeah.
Elyse: And of course, she got away with it, as we know, because it was animals.
Annie: Right.
Elyse: Somehow that was an art category, they didn’t know what to do with it, you know, basically. You know, so…
Annie: Yeah. But she also painted a lot of very dramatic scenes.
Elyse: That’s right. That’s right.
So, at this point, he suddenly realizes that he is going to be up against a lot of bad criticism and opposition. And I have to say, you know, you have to be a very, very, very determined artist to keep going in the face of this kind of commentary and criticism all the time.
He took on the words of his very good friend Gericault, who said to him, “Do what you are passionate about. Use strong contrast of light and dark. Choose the colors that you think are going to show the [00:29:00] emotions you want to show,” and this is unheard of to do at this particular time.
Géricault Death Turning Point
Elyse: Unfortunately, Gericault died in 1824, and this is when Delacroix is 26 years old. He died a tragic accident, you know.
Annie: Okay. Did he get eaten by an alligator or something? Was he doing something crazy?
Elyse: No, no, he fell off a horse. He was the one that was… He would ride these horses. I’m telling you, he was like one of these wild men. He had syphilis.
Annie: Okay. Lot of people did.
Elyse: A lot of people did. He had a bad case of it. So he wasn’t well, but he was, like, burning every candle you could possibly imagine in his very short life. And what happened was, he had been totally destroyed by the critical comments about Raft of the, The Raft of the Medusa.
And so he went to England and got even wilder and came back to France and spent the last few years painting horses and riding, and he apparently one day got on a horse that had not been tamed. I [00:30:00] don’t even know if that’s the correct word to use.
Annie: Broken, I think they say.
Elyse: Broken, right. Well, which gives you an idea of what you have to do, right?
Annie: Yeah, yeah, not good. Yeah.
Elyse: And he was thrown, and he literally broke his spine and died of the injuries.
Annie: So he was in his mid-30s?
Elyse: He was 33 or 34.
Annie: Oh, dang. All right, all right.
Elyse: Delacroix was actually with him.
Annie: Ooof!
Elyse: He was really a good… He was like his older brother, I think, so he was… It affected Delacroix enormously.
Annie: I bet. Oh, that would be so bad.
Elyse: And one of the things that happened after that was that Delacroix decided that he was going to just go ahead and paint what he wanted to paint, and he wasn’t going…
It’s hard to block out the voice of these critics, but he tried as much as he could. He switched because of Gericault. Instead of doing subject matter like Dante, which, I mean, why would that be upsetting to do a scene from Dante’s Inferno? I have no clue, you know. None.
Greek Tragedies and Backlash
Elyse: But taking [00:31:00] the suggestions that Gericault gave him and using the example of The Raft of the Medusa, which was about a current event that was a tragic event, the next two paintings that he did that he wanted to submit were based on two tragic events that had happened just a couple of years before in Greece.
Annie: Oh, okay.
Elyse: And interestingly, I think that it was his way of compromising so that instead of doing something mythological, it was like, who cares? There’ve been zillions of copies of, you know, every myth and every painting about Socrates and, you know, and all that, you know.
Annie: But… but he went for Greece, but modern Greece.
Elyse: Exactly.
Annie: Oh.
Elyse: When you see the paintings, and they are paintings that I know, and I didn’t realize, honestly, until doing the research, that they had been events that had just happened just a couple of years before. When you look at the paintings, you don’t know what time period it’s actually happening. There’s something very exotic about the painting in terms [00:32:00] of the, what the people are clothed in. The paintings are about massacres that took place between the Greeks and the Ottoman, the Turkish soldiers, who of course controlled Greece at that time.
What made these paintings complicated for the public, or more like for the art critics, was not the subject matter, because everyone pretty much knew about these events. It was the way he painted, and this is where we get some of these comments, and I’m going to just quote a couple of them, because it’s really hard to imagine, I understand, because I’ve worked in theater too, how hard it is to go against the grain when you have critics who hate your work. One of the critics wrote and said, “It’s smudges.”
Annie: Hm.
Elyse: “That’s all.”
Annie: Hm.
Elyse: “This painting is an error. It should never have been made.”
Annie: Okay, then.
Elyse: “It’s an incomprehensible composition.” And one of the things that they criticized the most, [00:33:00] besides the fact that you could see his brush strokes, was that there was no clear perspective. And if you take a look at some of these paintings, in this case it’s the scene of The Massacre of Chios, The painting is huge. It’s an enormous painting. I think it’s about three by four meters, I think. It may be a little bit smaller.
But it goes basically, like, in a circle. It’s like you have the Turkish soldiers on their horses, and you have the victims that are… The bodies floating around, and there is no one point perspective. There’s no background to see. It’s just this mass of circulating bodies and things like that, and it’s actually quite powerful as a painting.
Annie: Yeah, I’m looking at it now. It’s interesting. Wow.
Elyse: And there was a man, ironically, who played a major role in France for other reasons a number of years later, a man named Adolphe Thiers.
Annie: Yeah, he was a prime minister, or a president. He was the president.
Elyse: He [00:34:00] was the president during the Commune.
Annie: Oh, that’s right. That’s right.
Elyse: We just talked about him for another reason, right?
Annie: Yes, yes.
Elyse: So in this time, which is still the 1820s, he’s a journalist, and he winds up being one of the two art critics who loves Delacroix’s work.
Annie: Aha.
Elyse: And he supports him and writes positively about him his entire life. He never ever, ever changes his opinion about Delacroix’s work.
Gavroche Connection
Elyse: Another person that we both know, Victor Hugo, started out by liking his work, and then changed his mind later on and criticized his work a lot.
Annie: Uh-oh.
Elyse: And then eventually, of course, used the little guy, the little boy in Liberty Leading the People as an inspiration for…
Annie: Exactly! C’est Les Miserables!
Elyse: C’est Les Misérables, no?
Annie: Oui, c’est Misérables. So what was his name? Gavroche.
Elyse: Gavroche.
Annie: Gavroche is the name of this character in Les Misérables.
Elyse: So here we are.
England Sparks Revival
Elyse: [00:35:00] It is 1825, Delacroix is 27 years old, and he goes, “I’ve had enough,” and he goes off to spend a few months in England. And he says that it’s among the best months of his entire life. He sees Shakespeare all the time. He meets a lot of artists. He actually travels around the country. He goes to the museums, he sees the kind of artwork they do, and he meets Constable, and this is a huge, this is a huge honor for him, to meet this person who is just so very famous.
And he comes back, and he decides he’s going to try again. He’s going to enter a couple of more paintings into another one of these salons.
Sardanapalus Scandal
Elyse: A couple of years later, he enters a painting, and this is also a painting that has to do with events in Greece, because he is fascinated by Greece and by, basically, let’s call it exotic subject matter. And he does a painting called The Death of Sardanapalus, [00:36:00] or Sardanpal. I don’t know how you would pronounce it in French. It’s hard to…
Annie: Sardanpal.
Elyse: Sardanpal. All right. Which is now in the Louvre. And, it’s again, a painting that involves a picture that is a picture of a king, and there are these women floating around, and it’s very circular, but when you look at the painting close up, you have the most amazing colors. You have these incredible rich reds, and you have these dark shadows and these lights, and it’s extremely dramatic, and he’s extremely proud of this work. And the critic says, ” Where is the perspective?”
Annie: It’s rubbish.
Elyse: It’s rubbish. And this is what one of the other critics say, and this is the whole sentence. Translated from the French. “Monsieur Delacroix should not forget that French taste is noble and pure. He should cultivate a taste for Racine rather than for Shakespeare.”
Annie: Oh, well then.
Elyse: This is the ultimate [00:37:00] insult you can pay.
Annie: Please. Oh my goodness.
Elyse: So for some reason, I don’t know why, liking Shakespeare…
Annie: That was a problem!
Elyse: … Is associated with bad taste in painting. It’s very interesting!
Annie: These people were grasping for straws.
Elyse: Well…
Annie: Like, you know?
Critics Sting Deep
Elyse: It devastated him.
Annie: Uh-oh.
Elyse: This was in 1828. He’s 30 years old. He is still making money by selling his work, but… critics can really make an enormous amount of doing a lot of damage to your career. And what happened was, he started selling outside of France because the critics had such an effect on his reputation that people were not giving him commands anymore.
Annie: Well, that is true that, you know, even in our very, very small, little circle, like podcasting, any time I’ve looked at negative comments… I still [00:38:00] remember the first negative comment that we got on iTunes.
Elyse: Mm-hmm.
Annie: It was somebody who says she was upset because perhaps, we were talking about Notre Dame, and we had mentioned perhaps a couple of times in the episode where you could find bathrooms, and she said that was the only thing we were good at, is to help people find the bathroom.
And you know, it was like, if you look back, I don’t know if you can look that far back, but that just stayed with me for a long time, and I was like, “That’s not fair. We talked about so many other things.” It’s the unfairness of it, you know?
Elyse: You are absolutely right that it is true that we tend to remember the negative comments.
Annie: Dozens of very positive ones.
Elyse: I mean, it… Why? I don’t know. I think because it hurts you when you get a negative comment, but also it makes a kind of tick in your head, like, “What was wrong with that? Why did that person react that way?” I didn’t know that, though. You’re just telling me something I didn’t know about, from 10 years ago. Oh, my [00:39:00] goodness.
Annie: Well, it was mostly me they were criticiz- because I’m, was probably the one who was asking about the bathrooms. You know me, I need to know where the bathrooms are.
Elyse: Yeah. Well, I mean… okay, here we are.
He wrote, this is the only time where it’s actually written down that he wrote that he was devastated by what the critics had said to him. He had put everything of him into these paintings. He said, I know I can still get people to buy some of my work, but why can’t I get people to understand…. understand what I’m doing?” Which is really what the problem was. He said, “I wanted to put my feelings into the painting. I wanted to show how I feel about color. I want to show how I feel about the subject matter, and how I feel about actually painting, and they don’t see that. All they’re see is I didn’t get the perspective right. I didn’t do this. I didn’t do that,” you know, and they’re harping all of these things. So it really hurt him terribly.It’s very interesting.
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[00:40:00]
July Revolution Canvas
Elyse: And what happens after that is that he wrote and he said, “Well, you know, I know I can still get work, and I can still do some decorative work, but I have to prove to the public and to these critics that I can do a painting that everyone will think is great.” And what happens is that right after that, we have the Three Glorious Days of the Revolution of July of 1830.
Annie: Aha, yes.
Elyse: And of course, complicated as it is, what we have is three days when the people, and I don’t… You know better than me, are fed up with Charles X, fed up with the regime, which is extremely strict and repressive, and they take to the streets.
Annie: It lasts for three days in July.
Yeah, it was very short, but it was very intense.
Elyse: And very bloody.
Annie: Yes.
Elyse: And very bloody.
Now, Delacroix is not a Republican. That is, in the sense of the time, he [00:41:00] believed in a constitutional monarchy. He was good pals with Louis-Philippe, remember?
Annie: Ah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Elyse: But he sympathized with what had happened during the three days of the, what is called now, the…
Annie: The July Revolution.
Elyse: … the July Revolution. And even though he didn’t participate in it, he agreed with the reasons why they were out on the streets.
Liberty Leads People
Elyse: And so he took to his studio, and the next year, the year after it was over, he made this painting that we all know called Liberty Leading the People.
Annie: Yeah.
Elyse: And he said, he wrote about it, and he said, “I want to show people that I am sympathetic to their cause, and that I can make a painting that is relatively realistic and that has real human beings in it, and isn’t simply an exotic scene, and it isn’t simply a battle scene, and is a painting that [00:42:00] people can relate to.”
And he says, “I want people to understand.” So all of this is still as a reaction to the critical comments that were made a couple of years before about his painting.
Annie: So perhaps, because he had stayed away from topics that had to do with France, so he would paint Dante, he would paint events in Greece, but here he hit home.
Elyse: Right.
Annie: He was depicting a terrible event in France.
Elyse: Exactly.
Annie: And so people perhaps felt the emotional strength of this. Like, it really hit home.
Elyse: It hit home so much that it was a huge success right away. It was acclaimed as a painting, of course.
Annie: Well, I mean, if they had said that was a piece of shit, then there’s something wrong with these people.
Elyse: And so Louis-Philippe took it, bought it. It was bought for a sum that was considerable for that particular time period. It’s big. What, how big is it now? About-[00:43:00]
Annie: Oh…
Elyse: … about three by four? It’s about, I’d say it’s about three by four meters.
Annie: Perhaps a little more than that. It’s a large piece.
Elyse: It’s a large piece.
Annie: Yeah. You have to stand back to take it all in.
Elyse: So it was taken and put immediately into the Palais de Luxembourg, which I didn’t know until I was doing this… was the museum of great living artists at that time, the first half of the 19th century.
Annie: Oh, okay.
Elyse: And now, of course, it’s a lovely museum, but this was in the Palace of Luxembourg before it became the Senate again, and it was displayed there.
Censored Then Louvre
Elyse: However, even though Delacroix was extremely happy about the reaction, the public reaction to it, a couple of years later, it was taken out of the museum when there was the beginning of rumblings of some kind of social unrest.
Annie: Uh-oh, another revolution.
Elyse: Another revolution, and I don’t remember who actually did this, but it’s hard to imagine that to these days… I mean, to this day, you know, [00:44:00] that a painting or I suppose even a movie today would be that important.
It was taken out and given back to him. He was told to keep it in his studio because they were afraid that it would help give people ideas about taking to the streets.
Annie: Oh. Put this away.
Elyse: Put this away.
Annie: We don’t want to see this anymore.
Elyse: Hide this. We don’t want to see it anymore. It was eventually taken back out again, and then finally in 1874, put into the Louvre where it has been, of course, ever since.
Annie: Yeah, and when you go to the Louvre, I mean, this is one you must see. I mean, I know people go to the Louvre to see La Joconde, what’s her name in English?
Elyse: The Mona Lisa.
Annie: Yeah, she’s fine. There’s nothing wrong with her, but Liberty Leading the People, now that’s a painting.
Elyse: That’s a painting, and in fact the gallery of the French paintings, the ones by David, the ones by, you know, of…
Annie: Gericault is in there.
Elyse: Those are just fabulous to see. So here he is with this painting that was basically a [00:45:00] life-changer for him, but winds up a few years later. By this time, I don’t think he cared anymore, except he was probably so disgusted with all of this critical commentary.
Baudelaire Backs Him
Elyse: And the only other person besides Adolphe Thiers who defended his work and considered him a genius, believe it or not, was Baudelaire.
Annie: Oh, interesting. Okay.
Elyse: And Baudelaire, who, I don’t know how old he was because he outlived Delacroix. I don’t know exactly how old he was. He said from the beginning that Delacroix was a genius and that he was announcing the future of art and painting, which turns out to be absolutely true. So right till the very end, Baudelaire was the one person who never deviated from his opinion about the quality and the reason why Delacroix’s work was really wonderful.
Morocco Changes Everything
Elyse: And the second thing that makes a huge difference in both his work and the rest of his life is that in 1832, he [00:46:00] gets a chance to go to North Africa.
Annie: Okay.
Elyse: Now, keeping in mind that he is real buddies with Louis-Philippe, he decides when one of an emissary, the Duke of Morny, is sent by Louis-Philippe to North Africa, specifically to Morocco and to Algeria, to convince the Sultan of Morocco, because Morocco had a very organized structure with the Sultan, much more so I think than at the time that Algeria did. But to convince the Sultan of Morocco that the French had no intention of making Morocco a colony, which they had just done to Algeria. And Delacroix, for whatever reason, probably out of curiosity and wanting to go someplace different, because he had only traveled once in his life outside of France, and that was to go to England.
Annie: Right. Right.
Elyse: He pays his own way to go with the Duke of Morny to Morocco and Algeria, and he spends seven [00:47:00] months there with him.
Annie: Nice. He liked exotic things, because that’s very, very exotic.
Elyse: It’s very exotic. He was searching for new sources of inspiration. He was searching for light, color, and decorative elements that were different from what he had surrounding him, and he found everything he was looking for.
It was a game-changer, and it was a life-changer for him for the rest of his existence. He was 34. He died when he was 63, and for the rest of his life, he kept returning to the subject matter that was inspired by what he had seen there.
So while he was in Morocco, which blew him away, to use a very contemporary expression, was he was overwhelmed by what he considered to be the beauty of the place, by the beauty of the people, by the customs, by the exoticism of it, by the food that they had.
[00:48:00] There was nothing… nothing about this experience that he didn’t like. He made nine huge notebooks filled with drawings. He made hundreds and hundreds of watercolors. He did not have photography at the time. He recorded as much as he could. He bought textiles. He bought carpets. He bought costumes. He bought pieces of furniture. He brought them all back with him, and when he got back from there, and one of the other things he did, and he was, by the way, someone who never married, but who liked women, and he had had several mistresses, and he was notorious for being a man who liked to have mistresses who were married, so it didn’t have… they didn’t have to worry about whether they wanted to get married to him or not, you know?
Annie: Oh.
Elyse: I mean, this is the kind of thing, in the upper classes, you know, it didn’t make any difference. It was just, you know.
Annie: Right. Right, and perhaps if they’re a little older, they’re not as likely to get pregnant or something.
Elyse: Maybe, but I, as far as I know, he had never had any children with anybody, and not… there’s no rumors that I [00:49:00] know of that he begat anything or anybody somewhere along the way. Who knows? But he really was enamored of women, as a seductive element, as a source of beauty.
Annie: Well, he certainly painted a lot of half-naked ones.
Elyse: Oh, yes, he did.
Annie: He put them in the strangest circumstances. The guys are dressed, and the women, they’re just naked.
Elyse: Typical. Typical at the time. Absolutely typical.
Annie: Listen, they still do this in the movies.
Elyse: They still do in the movies, you’re absolutely right.
Annie: Watch The Big Bang Theory. In The Big Bang Theory, what’s the name of the lady? Oh, the pretty one. Anyway, the pretty girl in The Big Bang Theory?
Elyse: The blonde.
Annie: The blonde.
Elyse: Yeah.
Annie: She’s always in a tank top.
Elyse: Right.
Annie: In a tight tank top. Everybody else is wearing two, three layers.
Elyse: Yeah.
Annie: She’s in a tank top. There you go.
Elyse: Yeah. No, you’re absolutely right. I mean, this certainly hasn’t changed.
Orientalism And Access
Elyse: But this trip is really… What happens with this trip, and what happens with Delacroix, is that what he brings back to France is [00:50:00] work that is the beginning of a huge movement of art that lots of artists wind up doing called Orientalism.
Annie: Right. Yes, and we hear about that with a lot of, like, Monet, Manet, they all loved this stuff.
Elyse: They all loved it.
Annie: I mean, it was Asian as well, but the Orient being, you know, Algeria-
Elyse: Exactly.
Annie: … Morocco, and these are places French people were colonizing.
Elyse: And this was very… It was exoticism, but it was an excuse to work with certain kinds of colors and certain kinds of patterns and certain ways of painting that you couldn’t do.
Of course, the impressionists used all of this in a somewhat different way. And one of the things that is interesting, is that, of course, we’re talking about 200 years ago, much more so than even now.
This was a time when women were kept cloistered, married women were kept cloistered in what was a harem, although the word is Turkish, but it’s the equivalent of what, of a harem. And so in Morocco, the [00:51:00] only way he could visit a family was by going to one of the Jewish Moroccan families because the doctors of the sultans were always Jewish in Morocco.
Annie: Okay. All right.
Elyse: For, like, centuries, that’s the… But they were the doctors, you know?
And the Jewish families allowed him to come in. So a couple of the paintings that he did that are very famous show a Jewish wedding, and you see the courtyard. The houses looked exactly the same. The clothing looks exactly the same. There is no way of knowing the difference except that he’s allowed to be there.
Annie: All right. Interesting.
Elyse: And so he did a whole bunch of sketches that eventually became these beautiful paintings, and then when he got to Algeria, he convinced some family, I don’t know how, I mean, whatever the reasons that he was able to, to allow him to enter into the family so he could do sketches of some of the women in the kitchen and the family sitting around, and those of course became some of his most very famous paintings, [00:52:00] one of them being Femmes d’Alger Dans Leur Appartement.
Annie: Ah.
Elyse: Which is the one that I showed you on my postcard…
Annie: Yeah, yeah.
Elyse: … that I have on my wall.
Annie: Algerian woman in her apartment.
Elyse: You know, you can see them sitting on the floor, and if you take a look at the painting-
Annie: And they’re half naked.
Elyse: Well, no, they’re not.
Annie: Are they not?
Elyse: No, no, no, they’re wearing pants. They’re wearing these bouffant, you know, kind of wide pants that are…
Annie: The women are not?
Elyse: No, no, not at all.
Annie: Okay, no, they’re… Okay, that’s just the colors.
Elyse: No. They’re all dressed.
Annie: They’re wearing flesh-colored thingies.
Color Pattern Mastery
Elyse: They’re wearing light tops, but one of the things that you see when you take a good look at the painting, and this painting is the one that’s about a meter and a half by a meter eighty or something like that, is that you see the detail of the decorative elements. You see the tiles on the wall. You see the details of the carpets. You see the details of the patterns on the cloth. It is meticulously done, and lots of reds and blues, and these reds and blues are really the heritage he got from [00:53:00] listening to the advice of Gericault. Reds and blues and yellows. And he wound up becoming really famous for his use of color and of his way of dealing with color. So for the rest of his life, which is another 30 years, he goes back to this theme. All together, he painted over 65 paintings based on the theme of what he saw in Morocco and Algeria.
Annie: Wow.
Elyse: And he used it over and over again. And he just went there for seven months, and that was it, that seven months. That burnished into his head, but also they say he had these nine books of drawings and sketches that he used.
Late Fame And Murals
Elyse: Of course, by the time he gets… we’re in the 1840s and ’50s, he’s very interested in photography, interestingly enough, and he’s starting to not be well. He has had tuberculosis off and on all his life.
Annie: Mm.
Elyse: There are photographs of him from when he’s about 55 years old. He was tall and thin. He [00:54:00] had a very austere kind of face, and you can see that it’s starting to make him seem not very healthy, you know? He’s kind of got this, his cheeks are kind of sinking in a little bit and everything. He has this very serious kind of look. He apparently was extremely… he was a real dandy. He loved to go to the opera. He loved to go to the theater. He loved to hang out with very fashionable people. But little by little, he became a bit weaker because of that, and so his two obsessions were to continue work on what he considered to be these exotic subjects, and to go back interestingly to decorative elements.
And so what I didn’t know was that basically, aside from doing small-scale paintings, and he did some portraits, he did some very beautiful portraits, he started using photography to take pictures of nudes of naked men and women to use for anatomical purposes, and then make these very beautiful paintings. But he went back to doing a lot of decorative art in the last 10 years of his [00:55:00] life.
Annie: Interesting.
Elyse: And he got commissions because now he is famous. Now he is considered to be one of the greatest living artists of the time. So among the places where he has painted and where you can still go to see the painting are the Assemblée Nationale.
Annie: Right, so it’s not open all the time, but it’s, you know.
Elyse: Yeah. The Bibliothèque Nationale.
Annie: Yeah.
Elyse: And the Galerie Apollon in the Louvre.
Annie: Right.
Elyse: And besides that, he got commissions, and interestingly, because he certainly was not what you would call a religious man, he got commissions to do work in several churches as well.
Annie: Right, Saint-Sulpice has some.
Elyse: Saint-Sulpice. He did a piece, he’s done a couple of murals that are still in Saint-Paul, which is in the Marais.
Annie: Mm-hmm.
Delacroix Paintings in Saint Sulpice
Elyse: And he did a couple of other pieces, and then the big major last work that he did was three enormous pieces in Saint-Sulpice, which of course is in the Sixth Arrondissement.[00:56:00]
Annie: Right, so when you go in Saint-Sulpice, which I recommend you do, if you take my VoiceMap tour, I’ll tell you many times, you need to go inside this church. When you go in, you take a right, and it’s the last chapel by the back entrance where the Delacroix are.
Elyse: So he’s got, as far as I know, three… I don’t remember more than one of them, but there’s apparently three of his works in Saint-Sulpice.
Annie: I think it’s, they’re across from each other and the ceiling.
Elyse: And the ceiling.
Annie: Yeah.
Elyse: Exactly. So in order to finish this work, he moved around a lot. He bought himself, a small charming house on Place de Furstemberg, which is…
Annie: lovely place!
Elyse: … Lovely. Lovely, lovely, lovely. Behind Saint-Germain, which is of course in a lovely, gorgeous part of the Sixth Arrondissement, and it was within walking distance. He could get from there to Saint-Sulpice without much trouble.
And that is now the National Delacroix Museum because he bought the house, and he bought the big [00:57:00] garden in the back, which is now not quite, as far as I understand… you can go into it, but it’s not really attached to the museum itself anymore.
But the specific reason he bought that house, having had studios elsewhere, was so that he could get out of bed basically and just walk the few minutes to go to Saint-Sulpice. So at the end of his life, when he was not that strong, he did a lot of small pieces, and he worked to make sure he could finish the paintings in Saint-Sulpice before he was too weak to work anymore. Because he probably did know that he was dying.
Annie: How old was he when he died eventually?
Elyse: He was 65. He wasn’t that young.
Annie: But not that old either.
Elyse: But he was not in good health, especially the last eight, nine years of his life. He started to, you know, just really have a lot of problems.
And as you mentioned, lots and lots of people unfortunately at that time were dying of tuberculosis. And he was lucky, honestly, that he lived that long having tuberculosis. He had those [00:58:00] kinds of problems all his life.
Jenny And Legacy
Elyse: And interestingly, from a personal point of view, so here’s a man whose entire life was devoted to his art, to his decorative arts, to the painting, to this passion for expressing what he himself called, “My personal feelings, my personal emotions, through color and light and painting.” That’s what he wanted to do.
He had a woman, there was a woman named Jenny le Guillou, who, I don’t know how he met her. He hired her in 1835. So this is, he’s only 37 years old at the time. He hired her to be his secretary housekeeper. The term gouvernante in French is kind of ambiguous. It’s not really clear what she is. She took care of everything basically so he could just paint. That’s basically what her role was in his life. Nobody knows to this day if they were lovers or not.
Annie: Yeah.
Elyse: She stayed with him from 1835. She was the person holding his hand when he [00:59:00] died.
Annie: Mm.
Elyse: She had her own room, her own bedroom in the house in the Sixth Arrondissement. She moved with him, she traveled with him wherever he went, starting in 1835 she went with him. And he, in his will, he not only left her a huge sum of money, but he made her the person to be in charge of taking care of all of his work. Basically, she was a, what would, what do we call it?
Annie: Executor.
Elyse: … executor of his will to decide what to do with the works that were left. And he also put in his will, obviously having, I suppose, talked to her about it, he was buried in Père Lachaise, and he asked that she be buried next to him in Père Lachaise when she died. And she only outlived him by six years.
Annie: Hmm.
Elyse: And so if you go to Père Lachaise, which I am going to do in October, I’m going to go and [01:00:00] say hello to Eugène Delacroix, among other things, and to see his faithful friend Jenny at the same time.
And Baudelaire, who outlived him, said, “Now I hope that the world recognizes what a great painter he was.” And in the end, it was artists like Monet and Renoir and Van Gogh and Matisse who used him as a reference for the work that they eventually did. So he had a very controversial career, basically. He was famous the whole time he was painting, but there were people who passionately loved his work and people who passionately hated it, and now of course, he is considered to be one of the greatest painters of the first half of the 19th century.
Annie: He was awesome. Go see his work.
Delacroix Museum Takeaway
Annie: I visited his house, the museum, and it’s worth going. Maybe if I went again now that I’ve [01:01:00] listened to you talk about him, it would be more interesting, but I thought it was a bit underwhelming.
Elyse: Well, I’ve been to it twice or three times, I can’t remember, and I’m always perplexed because you don’t see a lot of his work.
And one of the things is now I know that at the end of his life, he only did small pieces. He was probably not able, in terms of energy, besides working on Saint-Sulpice, to do other things, and he just went back to a very small formats. I think he had a lot of people who wanted to just buy a small Delacroix, basically that kind of thing.
Annie: Yeah, probably.
Elyse: You know, so you’re right, you’re not going to be overwhelmed by seeing his work there.
Annie: Yeah, compared to what you see in the Louvre, it’s like, yeah.
Elyse: It’s more, I guess, it’s kind of like going to see the studio of Cézanne in Aix. You go to see where this artist worked.
Annie: Right. Right.
Elyse: Apparently, he bought it partly because it was close to Saint-Sulpice but also because of the garden, and he wanted the peacefulness of the garden where he could go out and think about what he was painting and what he wanted to do. So I like that idea, [01:02:00] that you go to a place that an artist worked to kind of feel what they must have felt when they were there.
But you’re right. If you want to really see his work, you need to go to one of the public places or obviously to the Louvre.
Annie: Wonderful.
Farewell And Thanks
Annie: Thank you so much, Elyse. That was fascinating.
Elyse: It was so much fun to do.
Annie: You tell such a good story. Thank you so much.
Elyse: You are welcome, Annie. Au revoir.
Annie: Au revoir.
Copyright
Annie Sargent: The join us in France Travel Podcast is written, hosted, and produced by Annie Sargent and copyright 2026 by Addicted to France. It is released under a Creative Comments, attribution, non-commercial, no derivatives license.[01:03:00][01:04:00]
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Episode PageCategories: French Culture, French History