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.