DELACROIX.ENTRY OF THE CRUSADERS INTO CONSTANTINOPLE.

The journey to Morocco, which he made in the spring of 1832, in company with an embassy sent by Louis Philippe to the Emperor Muley Abderrahman, is noteworthy for a further progress in his ability as a colourist and a new broadening of his range of subjects. When he returned to the port of Toulon, on 5th July 1832, he had seen Algiers and Spain, and had assimilated an abundance of sunshine and colour. It is in his Oriental pictures that his painting first reaches its zenith, just as Victor Hugo’s mastery over language was at its highest point in his Orientales. Goethe, in his West-östliches Divan, celebrated what is quiet and contemplative in the Oriental view of life. Obermann sang of the land of legend, of buried treasures, of Aladdin and the wonderful lamp; but for Byron (who was practically the first to introduce into Europe the perfume and colour of the East), for Hugo, and for Delacroix, it was the distant, bright-hued, barbaric land of the rising sun, the land of sanguinary warfare and overthrow, the home of light and colour. Here it was that the French Romanticists found the world that realised their dreams of colour. The East became for them what Rome had been for the Classical school. From the feeble and misty sun of Paris, and from the grey skies of the Boulevard des Italiens, they turned to Africa.

His enthusiasm for this newly discovered world resounds, full and clear, in Delacroix’s letters. “Were I to leave the land in which I have found them,” he wrote, during his stay in Morocco, of the men whom he saw about him there, “they would seem to me like trees torn up by the roots. I should forget the impressions I have received, and should be able only in an incomplete and frigid manner to reproduce the sublime and fascinating life which fills the streets here, and attracts one by the beauty of its appearance. Think, my friend, what it means to a painter to see lying in the sunshine, wandering about the streets and offering shoes for sale, men who have the appearance of ancient consuls, of the reincarnated spirits of Cato and Brutus, who lack not even that proud, discontented look which those lords of the world must have had. They possess nothing save a blanket in which they walk, sleep, and are buried, and yet they look as dignified as Cicero in his curule chair. What truth, what nobility in these figures! There is nothing more beautiful in the antique. And all in white, as with Roman senators or at the Greek Panathenæa.”

His palette was thus further enriched in lucid tints, the contrasts he formerly delighted in became less sharp and glaring, the gloomy background hitherto preferred was superseded by a bright serenity and a golden lustre. The colour-effect of his “Algerian Women” has been not unaptly compared to the impression produced by a glance into an open jewel casket. In his “Convulsionaries of Tangier” he has depicted with wild, demoniac energy the religious frenzy of a Turkish sect. Green, blue, red, and violet hues unite to produce an effect as of a sounding flourish of trumpets, recalling the music of the janizaries. The “Entry of the Crusaders into Constantinople” resembles an old delicately tinted carpet, full of powerful, tranquil harmony. Even in his old age he wrote: “The aspect of that country will be for ever before my eyes; the types of that vigorous race will move in my memory as long as I live; in them I truly found the antique beauty again.”

Baschet.
DELACROIX.JESUS ON LAKE GENNESARET.

The contemplation of such scenes induced Delacroix to undertake the representation of antique subjects, which he had hitherto avoided, not because he disliked the antique, but because of the aversion he felt for David’s treatment of it. During his sojourn in Africa he had come to the conclusion that the painting of scenes from ancient history should not be based upon the imitation of statues and bas-reliefs, as with David and his pupils; but that it should be imbued with the movement and passion of modern life, since the ancient Greeks were men of flesh and blood like ourselves. Therefore it is that he snatches the marble mask from the faces of David’s puppets. Flemish blood begins to move in the Greek statues, Flemish passion to break through their inflexible rhythm. Paintings such as the “Justice of Trajan” of 1840 represent the antique in a thoroughly personal and modern paraphrase, just as Shakespeare or Byron had seen it. The mad “Medea” is, from the point of view of colour, certainly the chief work of this group.

It was of course impossible that a man so highly endowed with emotional pathos should pass untouched the tragedy of the life of Christ and the sufferings of the Christian martyrs. By the Revolution religious themes had been absolutely excluded from representation, and up to this time the young innovators of the Restoration period had also felt an aversion for them. Their ideas were as little attuned to Catholic as to academic tradition. Delacroix was the first to treat once more of biblical subjects, so far as they are imbued with dramatic and passionate movement. Like Rubens, he regarded the lives of the saints, the story of the Gospels, and the tragedy on Golgotha as a poetical narrative like any other. His Mary, like that of the Flemish painters, is a sorrowing woman, the embodiment of unending grief.

Alongside of these easel pictures he produced, during a period of more than twenty-five years, a long list of monumental and decorative works; and they too were the most inventive, the boldest, and the most original which monumental painting produced during this epoch, not in France only, but in Europe. In this sphere also, where, under the pressure of old traditions and conventional types, it is so difficult to avoid plagiarism, Delacroix maintained his individuality. In 1835, at the suggestion of his friend Thiers, he was commissioned to paint the interior of the Chamber of Deputies in the Palais Bourbon—the most important commission which had fallen to the lot of any French artist since Gros painted the cupola of the Pantheon. Not long afterwards he decorated with verve and enthusiasm the ceiling of the Louvre, choosing for his subject the “Triumph of Apollo.” In the Library of the Luxembourg he had recourse to the Divina Commedia, and treated in a masterly manner the theme so familiar and sympathetic to him. In his works there is something of the joyous and sportive energy of Rubens’ allegorical pictures, but not the least trace of imitation. He understood decorative painting in the sense of the great old masters, Giulio Romano and Veronese, not as wall didactics and lectures on archæology; he knew that descriptive prose has nothing whatever to do with the walls of a building, but that the sole aim of such paintings is to fill the house with their solemn grandeur, to make the whole building resound as it were with sacred organ music. Between 1853 and 1861 came also the wall paintings in the Church of Saint Sulpice, and one would almost think that Delacroix finished them in feverish excitement, to show for the last time how enormous a store of passion and power still lay in the soul of a sexagenarian. Shortly after their completion, on 13th August 1863, he died, who was, in the words of Silvestre, “the painter of the genuine race, who had the sun in his head and a thunderstorm in his heart, who in the course of forty years sounded the entire gamut of human emotion, and whose grandiose and awe-inspiring brush passed from saints to warriors, from warriors to lovers, from lovers to tigers, from tigers to flowers.”

Baschet.
DELACROIX.HORSES FIGHTING IN A STABLE.