Eugène Delacroix, who was born on the 7th Floréal of the year VI., as the Republican calendar has it, or the 26th April 1798, according to our own reckoning, belonged to a distinguished family. His father, Charles Delacroix, an ardent Republican, who had voted for the death of his king, took a very active part in the political life of his country, and filled successively the posts of Minister for Foreign Affairs, Ambassador to Vienna, Departmental Prefect, and Ambassador to the Batavian Republic. His mother, Victoire, was the daughter of Boulle's pupil, the famous cabinetmaker Oeben, and was connected by family links with the even more illustrious Riesener. His brother, Charles Henri, achieved fame in the Napoleonic campaigns, was created Baron of the Empire in 1810, and became Quartermaster-General in 1815. The military career was also adopted by his other brother Henri, who fell at Friedland in 1807. His sister married Raymond de Verninac, who became Prefect of the Rhône and subsequently Ambassador to the Swiss Republic.
Delacroix was not an infant prodigy. He showed none of that irresistible early impulse towards art which is so often discovered by posthumous biographers of great masters. Indeed, his inclinations tended more towards music; and at one time he thought of adopting a military career. Even when, at the age of seventeen, he left college to enter Guérin's studio, he was by no means determined to devote himself exclusively to painting. There was not much sympathy between master and pupil. The impetuous youth, with his keen sense of the dramatic and romantic, and his passionate love of music, even if his emotionalism was held in check by intellectuality, felt repelled by the icy coldness of the man in whom the teaching of David had stifled any personal talent he may have possessed. And Delacroix soon found that he could learn more from copying Rubens, Raphael, and Titian at the Louvre than from Guerin's dry instruction. Moreover, he had the good fortune of gaining the friendship of his fellow-student, Géricault, who, inspired by a spirit akin to that of Delacroix, had already broken away from the tradition of the School, and who heralded the dawn of a new era with his intensely dramatic and almost revolutionary "Raft of the Medusa." Delacroix himself tells in his Journal that he was so powerfully impressed by the intense realism of his friend's work, that on leaving the studio he ran through the streets like a madman. How much he benefited by Géricault's example became clear when his "Dante and Virgil" appeared at the Salon of 1822, raising its author with a single bound to fame.
Delacroix's mother died in 1819. His small heritage was swallowed up by a lawsuit. His position would have been desperate, but for the help of Géricault, who procured him a commission for an altarpiece for the Convent of the Ladies of the Sacred Heart at Nantes. There is no trace of his later Romanticist fire in this altarpiece, and in the "Vierge des Maisons" for the church of Orcemont, which dates from the same period. Both pictures are based on the study of Raphael. Among Delacroix's intimates of these early days was the English painter, Thales Fielding, from whom he not only acquired his knowledge of the art of water-colour painting—then scarcely practised in France—but who awakened or strengthened in him the taste for English literature and especially for Shakespeare and Byron.
With the "Dante and Virgil" of 1822, Delacroix definitely dissociated himself from the frigid, lifeless tradition of the David School, of which Ingres was soon to become the acknowledged leader. "That School of Ingres," Delacroix once expressed himself on one of those rare occasions when he broke through his habitual reticence concerning his critical views on his contemporaries, "wants to make painting a dependency of the antiquaries; it is pretentious archæology; these are not pictures." "Cameos are not made," he wrote on another occasion, "to be put into painting; everything ought to keep its proper place."
The "Dante and Virgil" was his first pictorial protest against the rule of cold classicism. To-day we may be surprised that a picture so balanced in design, so sober in colour, so sculpturally plastic in the modelling of the human form, could have been considered in any way revolutionary and should have evoked such violent abuse as was showered upon it by the Davidists. But turn from this "Dante" to David's "Oath of the Horatii" and "Leonidas," which may be taken to typify the artistic standard of the time, and you will grasp the full significance of Delacroix's bold step. True, Géricault had already followed similar aims with his "Raft of the Medusa"; but this astounding picture, a record of a disaster which was then still fresh in the people's memory, was considered rather as a magnificent piece of pictorial journalism than as a work to be judged by the canons of the "grand style."
PLATE III.—THE DEATH OF OPHELIA
(In the Louvre)
This is one, and perhaps the most successful of many slightly varying versions of the same subject, which the artist first lithographed in 1834 and painted in 1838. The Louvre picture was executed in 1838. Delacroix, from his school days to his death, was an ardent admirer of Shakespeare's genius, and was deeply impressed by the Shakesperian productions which he witnessed during his short sojourn in London.