Eugene Delacroix Biography | Oil Paintings
4-26-1798 Charenton-St-Maurice, FRA - 8-13-1863 Paris, FRA
A champion from the outset of his career of the Romantic cause, Eugene Delacroix was legally the son of a politician but in reality, he was the illegitimate child of Talleyrand, a celebrated diplomat, whom the adult Eugène resembled in appearance and character. He trained under Guerin, a respected Neoclassical painter, but the dominant influence on his style came from Gericault, a fellow pupil.
Eugene Delacroix watched Theodore Gericault creating The Raft of the Medusa, one of the seminal works of the Romantic movement, and was overwhelmed by its raw, emotional power. He began to emulate this in his own canvasses. Two years later, achieving his breakthrough and popular success with his The Massacre at Chios.
Critics attacked Eugene Delacroix for his clear fixation with violence and his lack of finish. They accused him of wallowing in scenes of brutality, rather than acts of heroism. Also, they denounced his pictures as 'sketches', because he abandoned the smooth, linear finish of the Neoclassical style, preferring to build up his compositions with small dabs of color.
Like most Romantics, Delacroix was fascinated with the exotic but, he actually visited the Arab world. As a result, his Orientalist paintings were more somber and realistic than most European fantasies. The painting Women of Algiers in their Apartment, shows the exotic costumes, cool shadows, soft lighting of the harem, and the languid sexuality and dark skin of the Algerian women make this painting one of the earliest and most important examples of Orientalism, a trend that began in the Romantic period, and continued through the nineteenth century right up to the present. Delacroix, at the height of his maturity, handles an unusual theme redolent with forbidden sensuality.
Delacroix Liberty Leading the People, Neoclassicism in One Painting.
Eugene Delacroix's best-known painting, he painted the pictorial manifesto of Romanticism, Liberty Leading the People is an unforgettable image of Parisian's, having taken up arms, marching forward under the banner of the tricolor representing liberty, equality, and fraternity. But the heroine, who is the personification of liberated France, is portrayed semi-nude, wearing a Phrygian cap (emblem of the French Revolution), with a flag in one hand and a gun in the other. The fruit of an eclectic, Romantic, and literary culture, this canvas is an unusual blend of realism, propaganda, rhetoric and a record of contemporary events of the 1830 revolution against Charles X.
Eugene Delacroix had a big impact on the works of the Impressionists, who expanded on Delacroix's use of expressive brushstrokes and his study into the optical effects of color throughout the canvas and his love for the unusual inspired the Symbolism Artists. Eugène Delacroix's oil painting Tiger Playing with a Tortoise sold at auction in New York from the collection of the late David and Peggy Rockefeller in May 2018 for US$9,875,000 setting a new world auction record for the artist.
Art Movement History: Romanticism, Orientalism.
Artists Influencing Eugene Delacroix: Pierre-Narcisse Guérin, John Constable, Peter Paul Rubens, Theodore Gericault.
He Traveled To England, Spain. Morocco, Algeria.
Artist's Biography compiled by Albert L. Mansour at The World's Artist.
Eugene Delacroix Hand-Painted Oil Painting Reproductions.
Eugene Delacroix Museum Art Replicas on Canvas.
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