NOTES DESCRIPTIVE AND CRITICAL.—GOYA AND HIS CAREER.—FOUR ENGLISH PAINTERS OF FAMILIAR LIFE.—GÉRICAULT, INGRES, AND DELACROIX.
By Will H. Low.
OOKING backward to the first quarter of this century, it is hardly too sweeping an assertion to say that, with a single exception, there was little that was important in the way of painting outside of France and England. There were local reputations in all the other countries, practitioners of the art who joined to a respectable proficiency in painting an adhesion to the traditions which had been handed down to them. These men, in their time and place, were notable; and in the museums of their respective countries their works remain of chronological interest to students of painting. But to the larger public which these papers address, they are of little importance, having exercised but slight influence on contemporaneous art.
The exception already noted was in Spain, and there only in the case of a single painter. Francisco Goya y Lucientes, "Pintor Español," as he delighted to call himself, would be, indeed has been, a fascinating subject for picturesque biography. Charles Yriarte, the well-known French art critic, has given the world a most interesting and complete story of Goya's life, which, though it is only separated from our own day by a span of seventy years, chronicles the exploits of one who in the history of art must hark back to Benvenuto Cellini in the sixteenth century to find his parallel.
Goya was born March 31, 1746, at Fuente de Todos, in the province of Aragon. The son of a small farmer, he was placed when very young in the local Academy of Fine Arts at Saragossa, where he received instruction from Bayen and Luzan, painters little known outside of Spain. The swashbuckler instincts which were to govern him through life manifested themselves here, where in a street brawl he laid low three of his adversaries. He found it prudent to evade both justice and the vengeance which followed swift and sure in those days in Spain, by flying to Madrid. Soon after his arrival in the capital, however, in continuation of his old mode of life, he was picked up for dead in one of the low quarters of the town. Surviving the poignard, but again threatened with arrest, he joined a quadrilla of bull-fighters, in whose company he went from town to town, giving exhibitions of his prowess in the national sport.
THE GARROTED MAN. FROM AN ETCHING BY GOYA.
There is a tradition that this etching was made from nature, the model—some malefactor executed by the strangling method employed in Spain—being studied by Goya from his chamber window.
With all this, painting must have been somewhat of an interlude; but Goya had early shown signs of great talent, and before he left Saragossa, his master, Josepha Bayen, had confidence enough in his future to entrust the happiness of his daughter to his care by permitting his marriage to her. Goya's biographer notes that through all the various adventures of his career he had the utmost care for the material comfort of this lady. Her character must impress us to-day as charitable to excess; for, shortly after the bull-fighting episode, Goya found himself in Rome, where his next exploit was the abduction, from a convent, of a noble Roman girl. With the police once more on his track, he sought refuge at the Spanish Embassy, whence he was despatched home in disguise, probably to the relief of his country's representative in Rome. Before this adventure, which was only one of many which the charitable wife had to pardon, he had attracted the attention of David, who was then in Italy, and who, as his art differed in every way from that of Goya, must have been strongly impressed by his work to give it his approval.
DEATH ON THE BATTLE-FIELD. FROM AN ETCHING BY GOYA.
One of the plates from the "Disasters of War" where the grotesque and huge figure of Death appears to the combatants.
On arriving home Goya was given employment in designing a series of tapestries for the royal palace; and from 1780, when he was made a member of the Spanish Royal Academy, ensues the period of his greatest artistic activity. Carrying into his art the same excess of temperament which marked his life, his execution was rapid and decisive. Rebellious to the ordinary means employed by painters, he used various mediums, some of which have ill withstood the ravages of time; and, disdaining brushes, he often employed sponges or bits of rag in their place. In the case of one of his pictures, a revolt of the Madrilenians against the French, it is said that he employed a spoon.
In 1799 Goya was made painter to the king, Charles III., whose successor, the fourth of his name, continued his favor. The time, which was that of the notorious "Prince of Peace," Godoy, was favorable for a character like that of Goya, whose eccentricities were looked upon with an indulgent eye by a court which must have felt that its function was hardly that of moral censor. At least Goya, the intimate of Maria Louisa and the court circle, by no means abandoned his friends the bull-fighters and tavern-keepers. Fresh from an altar-piece for a cathedral, or a royal portrait, his ready brush found employment in rapidly painting a street scene, or even a sign for a wine-shop. A whitewashed wall for canvas and mud from the gutter for pigment, were the means employed to embody a patriotic theme at the entrance of the French soldiers into Madrid—a popular masterpiece executed to the plaudits of the crowd.
All this would seem to denote a charlatan; yet withal, Goya has fairly won his place amid the great painters of the world. Perhaps no better example could be found of the essential difference between the outward and visible actions of a man and the inward and spiritual grace of an artist than in this instance; and the Latin standpoint, always more intellectually liberal than our own Anglo-Saxon appreciation of the same problem furnishes the reason why Goya was left free to pursue his artistic career instead of languishing in prison. His illogical brush filled the cathedrals of Saragossa, Seville, Toledo, and Valencia with masterly frescoes, while with the etching needle he produced many plates. Some of these, like the "Caprices," a series of eighty etchings, are filled with imagination alternately tragical and grotesque; while another series, representing bull-fights, throughout its thirty-three plates depicts the incidents of the game with intense realism. The "Disasters of War," another series of eighty, were inspired by the French invasion; and never, perhaps, were the cruelties of war more strenuously realized in art than in these. Probably these etchings, executed, like all his works, by methods peculiar to himself, constitute his best title to remembrance. But his painting, replete though it be with the defects of his qualities, stands as a precursor of the great coloristic school of which Delacroix was the head and front. This is notably to be felt in his portraits, and in some of the rapidly executed single figures of which the Louvre has a specimen and the Metropolitan Museum, New York, another—the latter, "A Jewess of Tangiers."
GOYA. FROM A PORTRAIT ETCHED BY HIMSELF.
This portrait is the frontispiece to a series of etchings by Goya.
Before leaving Goya for men whose works are their only history, a characteristic incident, which caused his flight from Spain to Bordeaux in France, must be told. In 1814 Wellington was in Madrid and sat for his portrait to Goya. After the first sitting, the soldier presumed to criticise the work; whereat Goya, seizing a cutlass, attacked him, causing the future hero of Waterloo to flee for his life from the maniacal fury of the painter. It is said that, later, peace was made between the two men, and that the portrait was achieved; but for the moment Goya found safety in France, together with his long-suffering wife, who had incidentally borne him twenty children. At the green old age of eighty-two Goya died at Bordeaux, April 16, 1828.
ST. JUSTINA AND ST. RUFINA. FROM A PAINTING BY GOYA IN THE CATHEDRAL AT SEVILLE.
These are the patron saints of Seville. The legend has it that they were the daughters of a potter and followed their father's trade, giving away in charity, however, all that they earned more than was sufficient to supply their simple wants. At the time of a festival to Venus, they were requested to supply the vessels to be used in her worship, and on their refusing, they were dragged before the prefect, who condemned them to death, July 19, A.D. 304. They are generally represented with earthen vessels and the palms of martyrdom; in this case, the broken statue of Venus lies in the foreground. The Giralda tower, the chief ornament of Seville, and the prototype of the Madison Square tower in New York City, is their especial care, and it is believed that its preservation from lightning is due to them.
No greater contrast could be devised than the four works which follow, either in the character of the art or in the uneventful respectability of the painters' lives. They are all typical of a class of pictures which has been popular in England, from the time of Hogarth to the present day. The earliest of them is the "Blind Fiddler" of Sir David Wilkie, which was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1807. The dates at which the others, by Mulready, Webster, and Leslie, were painted would preclude their appearance here, if strict chronological sequence were imposed, as they were painted about 1840. It is instructive, however, to group them together, to show that these artists and their followers, who were legion, thought at least as much of subject as of method. Not that the latter quality is lacking. On the contrary, it is only too evident; but it is a method of convention. No one would imagine for a moment, in looking at any one of these pictures, that he was admitted an unseen spectator to some scene of intimate family life. It is this quality which the great Dutchmen in all their scenes of familiar life preserved; and when we look at a Pieter de Hooge, for instance, there is no suspicion that the homely scene has been arranged for our delectation. In its transplantation from Holland, however, English art lost just this quality.
David Wilkie, born in Scotland, at Cults in Fifeshire, November 18, 1785, came to London in 1805 to enter the Royal Academy schools, after some preliminary training at Edinburgh. His first picture, in the exhibition of 1806, "The Village Politicians," attracted attention, and was followed the next year by "The Blind Fiddler." The work of a youth of twenty-two, it is remarkable for its close observation of character and the skilful use made of what may be termed the theatrical faculty of grouping the personages so that their action tells the story. This is not a merit, and there is little doubt that the scene would be greater as art were it more consistently human. Character is well and pictorially rendered; but by its insistence in every figure, we feel that it is but a moment since the curtain was withdrawn and the tableau vivant shown. This and the pictures following it met with the most unbounded popular approval, were reproduced by engraving, and exercised an influence increased by the honors and fortune which were showered on the painter.
In 1825 Wilkie made an extended continental tour, and three years later, after his return to England, changed his class of subjects for historical and portrait painting, bringing to these later themes the same ability and the same lack of naïveté which characterized his former work. A Royal Academician since 1811, he was appointed first painter in ordinary to the king, on the death of Lawrence, in 1830. He was knighted in 1836, and died at sea on June 1, 1841, while returning from Egypt.
THE BLIND FIDDLER. FROM A PAINTING BY SIR DAVID WILKIE.
"An itinerant musician is entertaining a cottager and his family with a tune on the fiddle; the father gayly snaps his fingers at an infant on the knees of the mother, behind whom a mischievous boy, with the poker and bellows in his hands, is mimicking the action of the musician. With this exception, all, even the dog standing by the chair of its mistress, appear to be intent upon the music of the blind fiddler." This quotation, from the catalogue of the National Gallery where the original picture is placed, accurately describes it.
CHOOSING THE WEDDING GOWN. FROM A PAINTING BY WILLIAM MULREADY IN THE SOUTH KENSINGTON MUSEUM, LONDON.
To the title of this picture, the painter himself added, as expository of his theme and the source of his inspiration, the following passage from Goldsmith's "Vicar of Wakefield": "I had scarcely taken orders a year, before I began to think seriously of matrimony, and chose my wife, as she did her wedding gown, not for a fine glossy surface, but for such qualities as would wear well." The picture thus affords a good instance of the dependence on literature of the painters of Mulready's school. Its title alone would suffice, so well and simply is the story told; but, apparently, with the British public, and in the painter's mind, it gained an added grace by diverting the visual impression of the observer to the realm of literature. The picture is here reproduced from a copyrighted photograph by Frederick Hollyer, Kensington.
William Mulready was of Irish birth, having come into the world at Ennis, in the County Clare, April 1, 1786. In 1809, after a period in the schools of the Royal Academy, he exhibited there a picture entitled "Fair Time," which gave him almost instant success; and until his death, July 7, 1863, though producing fewer pictures than Wilkie, he worked on very much the same class of subjects. His color is less agreeable than that of the Scot, and his execution very much more labored. His life was uneventful, occupied exclusively with his work, which he loved; so much so that two days before his death, an old man of seventy-seven, he sat drawing in the evening life class at the Royal Academy. He had been a member of the Academy since 1816. The picture here reproduced is (even without the quotation from the "Vicar of Wakefield" which accompanies it in the catalogue of the South Kensington Museum) a simple story simply told. It is free from the mannerisms which mar much of Mulready's work, especially in the portrayal of children, and in the original is more agreeable in color than are many of his pictures.
CONTRARY WINDS. FROM A PAINTING BY THOMAS WEBSTER.
The happily chosen title explains sufficiently this pleasant scene. The picture, painted in 1843, is now in the South Kensington Museum.
Thomas Webster, born March 20, 1800, in London, and dying at Cranbrook in Kent, September, 1886, was another painter whose work had enjoyed the full meed of popularity, from 1825 to the time of his retirement from the Royal Academy in 1877. Pictures like the one here reproduced (from the original in the South Kensington Museum, painted in 1843, and entitled "Contrary Winds"), pictures depicting homely rustic life, were his specialty. His work had gained him the title of Royal Academician in 1846.
Through all this time, and in the work of many painters unnoticed here, the qualities are evident of an honest endeavor to paint the simple life of the country. With a higher standard of taste, and better preliminary instruction, painting would have gained; and the defect with which British art has been so often reproached, of being too literary, might have been lessened. Charles Robert Leslie, whose works are almost uniformly inspired by literature, was born at Clerkenwell in England, of American parents, October 19, 1794. He was taken to Philadelphia when five years of age, but returned to England in 1811, to study at the Royal Academy. Washington Allston and Benjamin West, both Americans—the latter at the time President of the Royal Academy—aided Leslie by advice.
After a preliminary stage as a portrait painter, Leslie exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1819 a picture of "Sir Roger de Coverley Going to Church," the first of a long series of pictures dependent on books for their subjects. In 1825 he painted "Sancho Panza and the Duchess," which procured him his election as an Academician the following year. The picture here reproduced is a repetition, with some slight changes, of the same subject, but was painted in 1844. Leslie may be said to have originated this style of subject in England, where he has had many followers; and, given the requisite knowledge of literature, his pictures tell their story with directness and humor. In painting, his work is rather hard; but in grace and style of drawing he was much superior to his contemporaries. Among his pictures are many suggested by Shakespeare, which have been popularized by engraving.
SANCHO PANZA IN THE APARTMENT OF THE DUCHESS. FROM A PAINTING BY C.E. LESLIE.
Sancho having, by the command of the Duchess, seated himself upon a low stool, is saying, "Now, madam, that I am sure that nobody but the company present hears us, I will answer without fear or emotion to all you have asked and to all you shall ask me; and the first thing I tell you is that I take my master, Don Quixote, for a downright madman." The original picture is in the National Gallery, London.
Leslie returned to this country in 1833 to accept the professorship of drawing at the West Point Military Academy, but remained only a few months. After returning to London, he enjoyed a successful career until his death, May 5, 1859. He was one of the first and most consistent admirers of Constable's work, and wrote his life. He also published lectures on painting, delivered at the Royal Academy, where he had been appointed lecturer in 1848.
The consideration of the two men whose portraits face each other here, and who stood thus opposed, during their lives, as the leaders of all that constituted art in their time and country, takes us back to France. Frequent returns of this character will be necessary in the course of these papers; for, without undue prejudice in favor of the French, it must be said that they alone have through the century maintained a consistent attitude in regard to art. Other countries have from time to time encouraged painting, with as frequent lapses of interest or lack of men who could legitimately inspire interest. Although transplanted bodily from Italy to France, in the time of Francis the First, art had taken so firm a root by the commencement of this century that, as we have seen, it grew and flourished though watered by the red blood of revolution. As a national institution, following the prescribed rules of the Academy, it has, of course, met with frequent assaults at the hands of men for whom prescribed academic law was as naught in comparison with the higher law of genius. In 1819 such a man appeared, with a picture which violated the unwritten law formulated by David: "Look in your Plutarch and paint!"
THE RAFT OF THE "MEDUSA." FROM A PAINTING BY GÉRICAULT IN THE LOUVRE.
The frigate "Medusa," accompanied by three other vessels, left France June 17, 1816, heading for Saint-Louis (Senegal), with the governor and principal officers of the colony as passengers. On July 2 the vessel stranded on a reef, and after five days of ineffectual effort to float her, was abandoned. A raft was constructed and one hundred and forty-nine men embarked on it, the remainder of the crew and passengers, four hundred all told, taking to the boats. For twelve days, the raft floated at the will of the waves and winds; then it was sighted by one of the convoys, the brig Argus. Only fifteen men survived. The picture represents the moment of their deliverance.
Jean Louis André Théodore Géricault, born at Rouen, September 26, 1791, came to Paris in 1808, and entered the studio of Guérin, where his method of painting displeased his master to such a degree that he advised him to abandon the study of art. Guérin had thoroughly imbibed the defects of the David method; and the spectacle of a youth who obstinately persisted in trying to paint the model as he really appeared, instead of making a pink imitation of antique sculpture, seemed to him to be of little promise.
INGRES. FROM A PORTRAIT PAINTED BY HIMSELF.
Painted for the gallery of Painters' Portraits in the Uffizi, Florence, in 1858, according to the inscription on the picture. This most interesting collection, which is still being added to year by year, comprises the portraits of the great painters, in most cases by their own hands, from the time of the Renaissance to our day.
Géricault, however, persisted; and with the exception of about a year, when the halo of military glory seduced him from his work, he worked so well and earnestly that, after two years' sojourn in Italy, he returned to Paris, a few weeks before the Salon of 1819, equipped with the knowledge of a master.
Taking a canvas about fifteen feet high by twenty in length, using the green-room of a theatre for a studio, he set to work. Disdaining the prevailing taste for mythology and classic themes, he took from the journals of the time the moving recital of the sufferings of the crew of the frigate "Medusa," abandoned on a raft in mid-ocean. Choosing the moment when the fifteen survivors of the hundred and forty-nine men who had embarked on the raft sighted the sail in the offing which meant their deliverance, he worked with an energy and fire which have remained remarkable in the annals of art. Certain of the figures, all of which are more than life size, were painted in a day, and when the Salon of 1819 opened, the picture was finished.
Seen as it is to-day in the Louvre, blackened by time and the neglect from which it suffered for six or seven years before it was placed there, it remains one of the capital pages in the history of modern art. The effect on the younger generation who saw it fresh from the hand of the master, accustomed as they were to the lifeless effigies of the classic school, was puzzling, and none but the most revolutionary dared approve of it. With the older painters there was a similar distrust of the impression which it caused. Yet David—an artistic kernel encased in an academic husk—admired it; and so did a swarthy youth who was soon to make his mark and who was a friend and former comrade of Géricault in the atelier Guérin—Eugène Delacroix.
DELACROIX. FROM A PORTRAIT PAINTED BY HIMSELF IN 1837.
This portrait was left by the painter at his death to Mlle. Jenny Leguillon, his housekeeper, and by her was bequeathed to the Louvre in 1872.
Géricault received a recompense of the fourth class, and, disgusted with his lot, took the immense canvas to London, where it was exhibited with success. During his sojourn in England he executed a number of pictures in oil and water color, and many lithographs, which are to-day eagerly sought by collectors. Returning to France full of projects for work, his health began to give way, and on the 18th of January, 1824, he died. The influence which he exercised had, however, borne its fruits. Already in the Salon of 1822 Ferdinand Victor Eugène Delacroix, born at Charenton, near Paris, April 26, 1799, had shown his "Dante and Virgil."
Before considering Delacroix, however, it is best to return to the earlier years of the century, and give J. Dominique Auguste Ingres, whose stern face confronts Delacroix's portrait, the precedence to which his age entitles him.
"Monsieur" Ingres, as the iconoclastic leaders of the romantic school called him in mock deference, was born at Montauban, August 29, 1780. His life was fortunate, and his history, which is chiefly that of his works, can be told in few words. A pupil of David, he received the Prix de Rome in 1801. He remained in Rome much longer than the allotted four years to which his prize entitled him, and returned there often during his life as to the source of all art. By portraiture and the constant patronage of the government, the material conditions of his life, which was of a simple character, befitting a man who viewed his mission as that of an apostle preaching the doctrine of pure classicism, were made easy; and the official titles of Member of the Institute, Grand Officer of the Legion of Honor, and Senator of the Empire all came to him with the lapse of years.
More royalist than the king, and the last of David's disciples, Ingres pursued throughout his life the even tenor of a man convinced that the source of all inspiration in art was Greek sculpture as amplified, transmuted, and translated to the realm of painting by Raphael. Painting in his hands became almost purely a matter of form. The element of color was virtually ignored, and form, chastened in contour and modelling, became through the magic of his genius the almost sufficient quality. The qualification is necessary. For though too great a man to lose, as too many of his master's pupils did, the grasp on nature; and while, therefore, his works, seen as they are through the glamour of the antique, never lack an intimate relation to existing life, it is impossible to resist the feeling before them that it is life beautified, of exquisite yet virile choice, but of life arrested. The reproach of his opponents of the romantic school that he was an "embalmer" has a foundation of truth.
A PORTRAIT OF INGRES, DRAWN IN ROME IN 1816.
This lovely drawing, from the collection in the Louvre, shows Ingres in his most pleasing aspect. By the magic of a few lines faintly traced, he has evoked for us the image of a charming person; and by the slight indication of costume, has also fixed the epoch at which the drawing was made. It was in the earlier years of the master, while he was in Rome, that he drew many such little masterpieces as a means of livelihood, drawings which he then made for a few francs, and which are now eagerly sought by the museums of Europe.
APOTHEOSIS OF HOMER. FROM A PAINTING BY INGRES.
Originally painted for a ceiling in the gallery of Greek and Roman Antiquities, in the Louvre, where it is now replaced by a copy of the same executed by Ingres's pupils. The picture represents Homer crowned as Jupiter by Victory, and seated before his temple receiving the homage of the poets, painters, sculptors, and architects of the world.
THE SEIZURE OF CONSTANTINOPLE BY THE CRUSADERS. FROM A PAINTING BY EUGÈNE DELACROIX.
In 1203, through political intrigue, a French army, raised to take part in the fourth crusade for the rescue of Jerusalem from the Mohammedans, joined with a Venetian army in an attack on Constantinople, then a Christian city, the capital of the Byzantine Empire. The city fell, but later was recovered. Then, on April 12, 1204, the invaders secured it again, and subjected it to a despoilment without parallel. Delacroix's picture portrays a scene in this despoilment. One of the invading barons, attended by his escort, rides on to a terrace, and the citizens fall before him, praying his mercy. Behind lies the Bosphorous, and beyond it are the shores of Asia.
For all this, it is hardly superlative to say that, since art began, no man has ever felt the exquisite and subtle harmony of line to the same degree as Ingres. Naturally the best examples of this, his greatest quality, are to be found in his rendering of the nude human form; and from the "Oedipus and the Sphinx," of 1808, to "La Source," of 1856, both of which are now in the Louvre, he returned again and again to its study, producing each time a masterpiece. His portraits, again, are most masterly, occasionally rising through sheer force of rendering each characteristic trait of his model (as in the portrait of M. Bertin, the editor of the "Débats"), to the extreme exactitude of Holbein, coupled with an allure so thoroughly modern that the whole epoch of Louis Philippe lives before us. In the slighter drawings of his earlier years in Rome, one of which is reproduced here, only the most typical details are chosen, and these are indicated with a delicacy of touch, a sureness of hand, that not only indicates the master, but lends a distinctive charm of truthful delicacy of which none but Ingres has known the secret. It is in such works that his influence will be felt the longest; for, as with his master, the great pictures in which he exemplified his principles remain cold and uninteresting. The "Homer Deified," reproduced here, was originally intended as a ceiling for the Louvre, and from a decorative point of view would excite a pitying smile from Veronese or Tiepolo. Taken bit by bit, as a beautiful exhibition of supreme knowledge, of the evasive quality of style in drawing, it is, however, admirable, and as a whole it has the merits of grave, balanced composition. It was the spirit of work like this which the master sought to force upon his epoch, rather than that of his portraits or of pictures like the "Source;" and the austerity of these principles met with more submission in the earlier years of the century than when later Géricault had shown the path in which the audacious Delacroix threw himself at the head of a band of romantic followers.
DANTE AND VIRGIL CROSSING THE LAKE WHICH SURROUNDS THE INFERNAL CITY OF DITÉ. FROM A PAINTING BY EUGÈNE DELACROIX, IN THE LOUVRE.
The subject is taken from Dante's "Inferno," and represents the poet and his companions and guide standing in a bark conducted by Phlegyas, while around them appear on the surface of the water the writhing bodies of the condemned, among whom Dante recognizes certain Florentines.
I have used the term audacious in speaking of Delacroix, and circumstances forced him to justify the epithet. Yet to a student of his work, and still more of his character as revealed in his writings (his recently published letters and the few articles published during his life in the "Revue des Deux-Mondes"), he would appear to have been by nature prepared to receive the full academic tradition, and only because of what appeared a violation of the tradition as he understood it, to have arrayed himself in violent opposition: a situation which rendered him in work and in life contradictory to his natural instinct. It is the old story of the defect of system. Even the most cunningly devised cannot make a place for all the many manifestations of temperamental activity. Like Géricault, a pupil of Guérin, Delacroix found in his master and in the general spirit of the school an insistence on the letter of the classic law to which his richly endowed nature could not bend, and was thus forced to rebel; whereas a more elastic application of received principles would have found him an enthusiastic adherent. In this way he missed acquiring the technical mastery over form, which proved a stumbling block to him through life. At times his drawing is possessed of a vigor and life which even Ingres never had; at others his work is almost lamentable in its lack of constructive form. In respect to color in its finest, most harmonic qualities, he is the greatest of French painters; and at all times he is master of an intense dramatic force. It was with a masterpiece—"Dante and Virgil"—that he made his first appearance at the Salon in 1822. At a bound he found himself famous. Guérin, who had counselled him against sending his picture to the Salon, grudgingly acknowledged that he was wrong. Gros told him that it was like Rubens, with more correctness of form—Rubens "chastened" was the word. The government bought the picture, paying the artist two hundred and forty dollars—twelve hundred francs—for it.
The same year Delacroix submissively made his final attempt for the Prix de Rome, but came out sixtieth in the competition. Thenceforward he was to be constantly before the public, constantly opposed, misunderstood, criticised; but nevertheless, with all the energy which shows in his portrait, constantly in the front. When his defenders had sufficient influence to force the hand of the ministry of fine arts, he was commissioned to paint for the state; and to this we owe the decorations in the gallery of Apollon in the Louvre, the decorations in the church of St. Sulpice, and others. When he received the order for the entrance of the Crusaders to Constantinople for the Gallery of Battles at Versailles, the good King Louis Philippe sent him word to make it as little like his usual style as possible!
Among Delacroix's critics Ingres, with all the force of his convictions, was the foremost. He to whom a sky had always served as a simple background was not created to understand the almost purple canopy of azure stretching far above the heads of the Crusaders; nor to find barbaric delight in the rich trappings of horses and men, since to him a drapery was simply a textureless covering adjusted to accentuate the form beneath. Delacroix, whose intelligence was of a higher order and who said of himself that he was "more rebellious than revolutionary," treated Ingres when they met on official occasions, as at the meetings of the Institute (where finally Delacroix had penetrated), with a high and distant courtesy which his sturdy adversary, strong in his pious devotion to classicism, hardly returned. Delacroix had by far the most brilliant following, reinforced as it was by the landscape painters, who from 1830 onwards gave to this century its most notable school of painting. Added to this was a fair measure of appreciation on the part of collectors.
Delacroix's genius found expression in many small pictures, all of them characterized by a gem-like coloration (which is more than mere color, however, for in it lies the secret of a powerful and direct expression of sentiment) and by a vivid realization of movement. Proud by nature, delicate in health, his life was far from happy; he never ceased to feel the sting of adverse criticism. "For more than thirty years I have been given over to the wild beasts," he said once. He had warm friends, who have left many records of his sweetness of disposition when the outer barrier of haughty reserve was broken through; but they were few in number. He never married; painting, he said, was his only mistress, and his passion for his art is felt through all his work. His death occurred at Champrosay near Paris, where he had a modest country house, on August 13, 1863; and four years later, January 14, 1867, his great adversary, Ingres, followed him.