Monday, December 10, 2018

Drawings by Eugène Delacroix (1798-1863)

Eugène Delacroix
Crouching Tiger
1839
drawing
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Eugène Delacroix
Lioness and caricature of Ingres
ca. 1850-60
drawing
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Eugène Delacroix
Studies of a Lion and a Female Nude
ca. 1845
drawing
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

"In 1815 Delacroix, aged seventeen, began to take painting lessons from Pierre Guérin, through whose studio Théodore Gericault had briefly and turbulently passed a little earlier.  Guérin was a tolerant teacher who attracted the sons of the middle class.  His classicist instruction had little effect on Delacroix; it was less important for his development than the literary education he had received at the lycée.  The example of Gericault with whom he was acquainted and for whose Raft of the Medusa he posed in 1818 left its mark on him, but in every essential respect he was, like many of his contemporaries, a self-taught artist, whose real school was the Louvre, where, even after the removal of the Napoleonic loot, the splendor of Titian, Veronese, and Rubens shone brightly enough to eclipse the school of David.  Among his fellow copyists in its galleries he met the young Englishman Richard Parkes Bonington who, together with his friend Raymond Soulier, was to introduce him to watercolor painting and a British tradition of colorism, and who helped to awaken his interest in Shakespeare, Byron, and Scott, the main literary sources of his romanticism."   

Eugène Delacroix
Combat of Nude Men, after Raphael
ca. 1823
drawing
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Eugène Delacroix
Figure studies for the Salon du Roi, Palais Bourbon
1833-35
drawing
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

"Behind Delacroix' new concern with compositional structure and balance lay the experience he had gained in carrying out the architectural decorations that occupied him during the latter part of his life.  The governments of Louis-Philippe and Napoleon III favored him with important monumental commissions, beginning in 1833 with the allegorical decorations for the Salon du Roi in the Palais Bourbon (Chamber of Deputies).  This was closely followed by the even larger enterprise of the Palais Bourbon's library (1838-1847) where Delacroix covered a succession of domes and pendentives with scenes celebrating the heroic lineage of the arts and sciences, in a dramatic succession beginning the Orpheus' gift of civilization to mankind and ending with Attila's destruction of Italy."  

Eugène Delacroix
Studies of Hands and Figures for the Salon du Roi, Palais Bourbon
ca. 1833-38
drawing
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Eugène Delacroix
The Tribute Money - Study for the Library of Palais Bourbon
1843
drawing
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Eugène Delacroix
Studies of Fallen Male Nude for Hercules and the Horses of Diomedes
1852
drawing
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Eugène Delacroix
Seated and Standing Male Nudes after photographs by Eugène Durieu
1855
drawing
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Eugène Delacroix
Ecorché - Torso of a Male Cadaver
ca. 1828
drawing
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Eugène Delacroix
Ecorché - Three Studies of a Male Cadaver
before 1863
drawing
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Eugène Delacroix
The Triumph of Genius over Envy
ca. 1849-51
drawing
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

"The Universal Exposition of 1855 showed thirty-six of his paintings, a tribute to him (together with Ingres) as one of France's two preeminent living artists.  Having long been denied admission to the Academy, of which he privately took a coolly realistic view, he was at last admitted to this body of distinguished mediocrities in 1857.  Frequently ill with bronchial infections and economizing his physical strength, he lived a frugal bachelor's life but worked with unabated energy until the end of his life.  For all his courtesy, his person could command awe and, on occasion, a secret terror."

Eugène Delacroix
Studies of Male Heads and Figures
before 1863
wash drawing and watercolor
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Eugène Delacroix
The Giaour on Horseback
ca. 1824-26
drawing
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

– quoted passages are from the biography of Delacroix in the Systematic Catalogue of the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC