[In the following essay, Parsons examines the relationship between literature and painting, often left unexamined by artists themselves, with the notable exception of Delacroix.]

The problem of the relationship between literature and painting, although it has attracted for a long time the attention of scholars and has led to interesting research, still remains a profitable field of investigation. Unfortunately, artists and men of letters are often reluctant to admit how much they owe to one another. An exception is Eugène Delacroix, who lived from 1798 to 1863. His case affords us by far the best opportunity for re-examining the problem under consideration. For Delacroix in addition to being a great painter was also a prolific writer and in his literary works he not only admits openly his debt to literature but also devotes much attention to comparative aesthetics. The facts we discover in his Journal, his correspondence, and his published articles enable us to appreciate the nature and extent of the influence of literature on his art as a painter. These same facts help us to understand in their early stages some of the more significant trends of modern art.

For Delacroix the pleasure we gain from the contemplation of nature does not reside, as certain schools of painting would have us believe, in purely visual sensations. Colours and forms may indeed be in themselves a source of enjoyment and the painter of “Dante and Virgil” is the first to admit it when he states that “the first quality of a painting is to be a delight for the eye.” But he adds that “this does not mean that there need be no sense in it.” By sense he means something which goes beyond the immediately perceptible and constitutes an activity of the spirit. Through memory each object which comes before our eyes awakens not only recollections of similar objects seen before but also a host of other associations whose dwelling place is the heart, the soul and mind of man. The sight of a landscape will arouse in us feelings of joy or sadness coinciding with or contradicting the mood of the moment. On viewing once again a familiar scene, we may relive former experiences, remember old friends or even anticipate events to come. The pleasure we feel on such occasions cannot be said to arise only from what we perceive but rather from the combined effect of both the object and what it awakens in us. For Delacroix the visible world is never completely divorced from the inner world of thought and feeling. Many pages of his Journal illustrate the unusual power which objects have of stirring his inner being.

During a trip to Dieppe in September 1852, he tries to explain the intense pleasure which the ocean and the sandy beaches afford him:

In the afternoon the tide was low and I was able to walk far out across the dry sand. I felt the most delightful pleasure at being by the ocean. All the same I think that the recollection of the things we enjoy is their greatest attraction, the memories they evoke in our eyes and minds and especially in our hearts. I'm always thinking of Bataille and of Valmont as it was when I first went there so many years ago. Regrets for past times, the charm of my early years, the freshness of first impressions, have more effect on me than the scene itself.¹

On another occasion he again asks himself the same question:

How shall I find words to describe my enjoyment in this countryside? It is a mixture of all the sensations that are lovely and pleasant to our heart and imagination. It makes me think of those places where I had so much quiet happiness when I was young.²

Sounds also have the power of stirring strong emotions in the painter. The song of birds, the murmur of a brook, the rustling of leaves, affect him powerfully.

As I came home this evening I heard the nightingale. I can still hear him a long way off. Truly his song is unique, but more because of the emotions it arouses than for anything else. … Hearing it is like looking at the vast sea, one always has to wait for one more wave to break before tearing oneself away: one cannot bear to leave it.³

Fragrances also are reminders of past experiences:

There is no perfume like that of wet earth and trees! How penetrating is this strong scent of the forest, how quickly it brings back to me the pure and lovely memories of early childhood and the feelings that come from the depth of my soul.⁴

Sometimes the source of his pleasure is not so precise, and he merely speaks of “a penetrating charm,” “an indescribable sensation of pleasure.” Frequently he rises above the object itself and enters into the pure world of the spirit, with the consciousness of approaching those eternal truths which he claims are innate and whose quality it is to bring man into closer participation with the infinite.

Beloved places where I once saw you, dear friends whom I can see no more, delightful days that I used to enjoy so much and that are now gone forever! How often has the sight of the green leaves and the scent of the woods awakened such memories, the very sanctuary and holy of holies, to which the spirit flies to take refuge if it can from the cares of our daily lives.⁵

This sensitive and emotional nature, expressed in lyrical terms, and the preoccupation with himself are characteristics which Delacroix shares with the romantic poets of his age, with Hugo, Vigny, and Musset. Like many of them also, he possesses unusual imaginative powers. He is as much as Hugo and Balzac a visionary, a creator of fictions. This imagination is accompanied by a strong sense of the dramatic. These gifts were undoubtedly native but their intense manifestation at this time can be explained, in part at least, by the historical and social circumstances in which these writers and artists saw the light of day. They were born at the end of the most spectacular period in French history: the Napoleonic era, a time of tremendous activity, of exceptional happenings, when the wildest dreams were translated into reality; a time marked by brilliant victories, heroic actions, the lure of distant and exotic lands, the feverish exaltation which accompanies seemingly impossible achievements. Frenchmen under Napoleon had felt more deeply and had done more in twenty years than they had in all previous centuries. This storehouse of experiences and an emotional outlook strained, weakened, and disturbed in the intensity of action, was their legacy to the new generation. But whereas the soldier actually lived these experiences on the plains and hills of Italy, Egypt, and Russia, the poet relived them, through imagination, on the fictitious battleground of his own tormented soul. The legend of Napoleon continued to haunt the memories of Frenchmen for generations to come. Delacroix became “the painter of the destructions of empire, the violations of territory, the foreign intrusions on the soil of Chio, the dreams of conquest towards the Orient; and there will remain with him, of all these half glimpsed grandeurs, the unfailing bitterness of one who was to know only their decay.”⁶

These two characteristics: on the one hand, a strongly emotional and lyrical nature, on the other, a powerful imagination attracted to intensely violent and dramatic situations, underlie the art of Delacroix. They seem at the outset incompatible, not easily reconciled, especially through the medium of painting. And indeed the attempts of the French romantic writers to create great works of historical fiction led only to mediocre results. To this apparent contradiction the painter will find his own solution, but he will not always be successful as will be shown later in the particular case of the “Death of Sardanapalus” where the lyrical poet strongly overshadows the tragic dramatist.

The problem in the case of Delacroix was complicated further by the fact that his imagination was not at the outset a visual one. Except for his sketches and his portraits, his paintings are not on the whole directly inspired from reality. His imagination is intellectual, it is that of a writer absorbed in the unfolding of an essentially dramatic action. He was obliged to find formal means, frequently borrowed from other great painters, to seize this action at a given moment and at the same time suggest its continuity. His fundamental problem, however, was that of forcing painting to become a vehicle for his own personal feelings. But how can a painter translate effectively such elusive emotions and sentiments as those associated with the memory of past events, the recollection of former friends, the joy of hearing the song of the nightingale, or the awareness of the infinite? The expression of such emotions, as well as the depiction of vast scenes of historical fiction, seem to transcend the realm of the plastic arts to invade the field of literature. And indeed Delacroix admits readily that these experiences as such can best be formulated through the written word. For a while before the appearance of his first great masterpiece, “Dante and Virgil” (he was then twenty-four years of age), he had hesitated between literature and painting. Strongly drawn to painting, he felt that his particular vision required a verbal as well as a plastic outlet. At such times he envied the privileges of the poet.

“Why am I not a poet? But at least let me feel as strongly as possible in all my paintings the emotion that I want to pass on to others.”⁷

The problem of literary creation, moreover, was to attract him all his life. On the 3rd of September, 1822, he decided to set down each day his thoughts, in writing, in the form of a journal, and except for a lapse of twenty-three years between 1824 and 1847 he remained faithful to this habit. This voluminous collection of thoughts and notes ranges from such practical matters as the technique of painting, the purchase of material, statements of sums owed to friends and models, to the most profound considerations on art and life. It is now accepted in its better parts as a valuable contribution to literature. Many passages reveal in Delacroix exceptional talents as a lyric poet and a master of French prose. But the very fact that he had intended this journal to be a scrupulously personal one, not intended for publication, indicates clearly that he felt that his literary efforts would not lead him to fame. Painting was to be not only his chosen medium, but also the ideal means of expressing his particular outlook. His conviction of the superiority of painting over the other arts, to translate emotion, is evident throughout his journal. He writes:

The type of emotion peculiar to painting is, so to speak, tangible; poetry and music cannot give rise to it. In painting you enjoy the actual representation of objects as though you were really seeing them and at the same time you are warmed and carried away by the meaning which these images contain for the mind. The figures and objects in a picture, which to one part of your intelligence seem to be the actual things themselves, are like a solid bridge to support your imagination as it probes the deep, mysterious emotions of which these forms are, so to speak, the hieroglyph, but a hieroglyph far more eloquent than any cold representation, the mere equivalent of a printed symbol …⁸

The printed word in itself as a symbol has no meaning; the thought which it represents is all important. But the symbols of the painter, lines, forms, and colours, on the other hand, have in themselves a power of awakening intense pleasure which is like an accompaniment to the thought itself. Delacroix explains:

The smile of a dying man! The look in the mother's eyes! Embraces of despair! Precious realm of painting! That silent power that speaks at first only to the eyes and then seizes and captivates every faculty of the soul! Here is your real spirit, here is your own true beauty, beautiful painting, so much insulted, so grievously misunderstood and delivered up to fools who exploit you. But there are still hearts ready to welcome you devoutly, souls who will no more be satisfied with mere phrases than with inventions and clever artifices.⁹

Painting has also the power of being more accessible. The largest painting can be seen in a moment. If it is good, one can enjoy it for as long as one wishes or leave it immediately. This is not so in literature. It is often difficult to follow with the necessary attention all the deductions and developments of a book even when it is well written:

… for a painter a book seems like some great edifice, whose appearance is often an indication of its contents. Once you have entered you must give equal attention to the succession of rooms contained in the building that you are visiting, not forgetting those which you have left behind, nor neglecting to look ahead from what you already know, so as to form the impression that will be yours at the end of your journey.¹⁰

Here lies chiefly, it would seem, the key to Delacroix's inability to express himself satisfactorily in a literary way. Strongly attached to the material world of objects, his talent consists more in the analysis and synthesis of forms and colours than in the development of a logical chain of thought. He admits this weakness himself when he tells us of his difficulties in writing an article on Poussin:

This infernal business takes much more concentration than I usually give to painting. … My trouble is that I have to confine the article to a certain length in which I am obliged to cover a great many different subjects. I need a method to co-ordinate the different sections and to arrange them in the proper order, especially since I have made a great many notes, so as to remember everything that I want to bring into the article.¹¹

Although Delacroix was himself convinced that literature was not his vocation, he clearly perceived that the example of great writers, particularly that of great poets, could help him in the pursuit of his art. He read widely and his Journal contains innumerable references to the books he enjoyed along with sound critical judgements concerning their authors. He believed, as did the romantic writers, in the exceptional rôle of the poet and the artist as interpreters of God's ways to man—a privilege which often leads to isolation, distrust and misunderstanding on the part of society. The tragic example of the Italian poet, Tasso, imprisoned because of his presumed madness, is a theme which recurs constantly in his paintings. The achievements of great masters of literature such as Dante, Shakespeare, Byron, Goethe, Racine, are for him an inspiration, a challenge, and he secretly hopes to rival them in painting. His admiration for Dante is unlimited.

Dante is truly the greatest of poets. One thrills with him, as if before the thing itself. … Concentrate deeply before your painting and think only of Dante. In his poems lies what I have always felt in myself.¹²

The works of Byron constantly remind him of the wealth of experience to be derived from poetry.

The poet is very rich: always remember certain passages from Byron, they are an unfailing spur to your imagination; they are right for you. The end of the Bride of Abydos, The Death of Selim, his body tossed about in the ocean and that hand, especially that hand, held up by the waves as they break and spend themselves upon the shore. This is sublime and it is his alone. I feel these things as they can be rendered in painting.¹³

Certain literary accounts have an extraordinary power to stir his feelings. They fire his imagination and provide him with an unending source of subjects. He tells us:

What I do to find a subject is to open some book capable of giving me inspiration and then allow myself to be guided by my mood. … There are certain books that never fail to inspire, also certain engravings. Dante, Lamartine, Byron, Michelangelo.¹⁴

The majority of the subjects of his great painting are in fact borrowed from literature.

Dante provides him with the inspiration for his first masterpiece, “Dante and Virgil.” It is a transposition of the eighth canto of the Inferno in which Dante tells us how, as he crosses the infernal river Styx in a rowboat, Philipp Argenti tries to grasp the boat but is cruelly pushed back into the murky, burning stream where those who have sinned by pride are to suffer for eternity.

And as we ran on that dead swamp, the slime
Rose before me, and from it a voice cried:
“Who are you that come here before your time?”
And I replied: “If I come, I do not remain.
But you, who are you, so fallen and so foul?”
And he: “I am one who weeps.” and I then:
“May you weep and wail to all eternity,
For I know you, hell-dog, filthy as you are.”
Then he stretched both hands to the boat, but warily
The master shoved him back, crying: “Down! Down!
With the other dogs!”(15)

It is reported that Delacroix completed this picture in a few weeks. The painter has given, by his own means as a painter, a vision of the fear of hell. The water of the Styx shines in the darkness like a sweat of terror, despair, and rage and in red, purple, and orange colours together with the lurid, naked bodies evokes a mysterious horror.

Like the French romantic writers of his generation, Delacroix was greatly attracted to Sir Walter Scott and in his novels he found the inspiration for many of his important paintings. In the “Abduction of Rebecca” he recreates an episode from Ivanhoe. The scene depicts the last moments of the siege of the castle of Torquilstone by King Richard I—the Black Knight. Within the castle the Templar Bois-Guibert has held as prisoners Cedric the Saxon and his daughter Rowena, Isaac the Jew and his daughter Rebecca, and Wilfrid the disinherited son of Cedric. As the Black Knight finally succeeds in forcing his way into the castle, Ulrica, the daughter of the former deposed owner of Torquilstone, sets fire to the building. Wilfrid, Rowena, Cedric, and Isaac are rescued but the Templar, fighting off his assailants, escapes with Rebecca whom he loves. This is the passage (ch. 31) which seems to have given Delacroix the main idea for his work:

Animated, however, by despair, and supported by the example of their indomitable leader, the remaining soldiers of the castle fought with the utmost valour; and, being well armed, succeeded more than once in driving back the assailants, though much inferior in numbers. Rebecca, placed on horseback before one of the Templar's Saracen slaves, was in the midst of the little party; and Bois-Guibert, notwithstanding the confusion of the bloody fray, showed every attention to her safety. Repeatedly he was by her side, and, neglecting his own defence, held before her the fence of his triangular steel-plated shield; and anon starting from his position by her, he cried his war cry, dashed forward, struck to earth the most forward of the assailants, and was in the same instant once more at her bridle rein.

The painter succeeds in recreating in a single vision all the atmosphere which characterizes the episode in the book. A feverish battle scene of death and devastation: the castle is burning in the background amid swirling clouds of smoke; the confusion and hesitancy of the siege is forcefully rendered by the tumultuous suggestion of lines and forms of the attackers at the foot of the castle; every detail in the attitude of the horse and the figures in the foreground announces the hasty impending flight of the Templar and his victim.

Delacroix returns repeatedly to Byron for inspiration and subject matter. In Sardanapalus he finds the subject of one of his most famous works, “The Death of Sardanapalus.” Sardanapalus, King of Assyria, is besieged in his palace by his enemies. Reclining on a superb couch, placed at the summit of a funeral pyre, he gives orders to his eunuchs and to the officers of his palace to slaughter his wives, his pages, his favourite horses. None of his beloved possessions is to survive him. Aisch, his favourite, refuses death at the hands of a slave and kills herself by hanging from one of the columns which support the dome of the palace. Myrrha sets fire to the pyre and casts herself into the flames.

One might have expected from the brush of Delacroix another scene of horror and death. And indeed his first sketch for the scene had been rather brutal and sombre. However, when he came to the actual execution of the painting he used a living model to depict the suppliant slave who casts herself on the bed of her dying master. The beauty of the model so entranced him that he forgot his original impression of Byron's play and instead of the funereal scene he had first envisaged he paints a voluptuous poem, worthy of Titian, glorifying feminine beauty in an atmosphere of oriental splendour. As far as his artistic convictions are concerned, this was a mistake he did not repeat.

“The Shipwreck of Don Juan”: Delacroix goes again to Byron for inspiration. The scene represents one of the many adventures of Don Juan. The ship “Trinidada” on which Don Juan and his companions have embarked is on its way to Leghorn from Cadiz. During the journey a violent storm arises, and so belabours the ship that it sinks. Don Juan and part of the crew escape in a long-boat:

They counted thirty, crowded in a space
Which left scarce room for motion or exertion;
They did their best to modify their case,
One half sate up, though num'b with the immersion,
While t'other half were laid down in their place,
At watch and watch; thus shivering like the tertian
Ague in its cold fit, they fill'd their boat,
With nothing but the sky for a great coat.(16)

For days they drift hopelessly on the open sea. Their provisions are soon exhausted and they begin to feel the cruel pangs of hunger and thirst. On the sixth day they decide to eat Don Juan's spaniel, much to its owner's sorrow. On the seventh day, they draw lots from a hat to see which one of them will be sacrificed to sustain the lives of the others. The lot falls on Pedrillo. It is this dramatic moment which inspired Delacroix to record the scene in all its horror. The tortured faces of most of the sailors spell fear and a gnawing apprehension as to the eventual outcome of their decision. Some are so exhausted that they have lost all interest. Others are dying wracked by agonizing convulsions. The vast and sombre expanse of sea behind the boat strongly underlines the hopelessness of their plight.

Shakespeare provides him with an endless source of subjects. He was already acquainted with Shakespeare before his visit to England in 1825. Three years before he closely associated himself with the figure of the tragic, tormented Hamlet in a self portrait. But it was in London, on the stage of Covent Garden and Drury Lane that he truly discovered in the original the works of Shakespeare. Delacroix went almost every evening to the theatre. His dramatic experience thus far had been limited to the disciplined and measured art of a Talma or a Mlle Mars. Now he found something new. Kean's unrestrained and powerful portrayals of Richard II, Othello, and Hamlet left him entranced. The visual memory of these exceptional performances, combined with another reading of the plays, prompted his numerous graphic commentaries on the works of Shakespeare: lithographs from Hamlet, drawings from Romeo and Juliet, and paintings from Macbeth and Othello.

Oddly enough it was also in England at a performance of Faust that his eyes were opened to the possibilities of transposing scenes from the masterpiece of Goethe. In a letter to a friend he reports:

I have seen here, a play of Faust, which is the most diabolical one can imagine. Mephistopheles is a masterpiece of caricature and intelligence. It is an adaptation of Goethe's Faust but the essence of the poem is preserved. … The scene of the church is depicted with the chanting of the priest and the sound of the organ in the distance.¹⁷

It was undoubtedly the strong impression which this performance had upon Delacroix that inspired him to execute his series of lithographs illustrating various episodes of Goethe's poem. When Goethe saw these illustrations he confided to his friend Eckermann:

M. Delacroix is a man of great talent, who found in Faust his proper element. … And if I must confess that M. Delacroix has, in some scenes, surpassed my own notions, how much more will the reader find all in full life, and surpassing his imagination.¹⁸

This tribute of Goethe is in itself an answer to those who would consider Delacroix as merely an illustrator of books. Literary sources are his main inspiration but he goes far beyond them, using them as vehicles for the expression of his own personal outlook and his deep insight into the human soul. The painter defends himself against such accusations as this one:

“Come now! You are original you say and yet your enthusiasm is only aroused when you read Byron or Dante! You mistake this fever for powers of production. Isn't it rather a need to imitate?”¹⁹

“No!” [answers Delacroix] “The fact is that these writers haven't yet said the hundredth part of what there is to say. The new things that nature has entrusted to great imaginations to say about her works are more numerous than even those works themselves.”²⁰

Literature then serves as a stimulus to awaken the imagination and to supply the artist with subjects. It can also come to the aid of the painter in the actual technical phase of his work. It can serve to sustain inspiration and maintain the artist in an emotional climate favourable to expression. Delacroix tells us that when he was at work on his Dante and Virgil, his friend Pierret, who had spent a considerable time in Italy, came one day to his studio, and picking up a copy of the Inferno, began to read out loud, a canto—probably the eighth, which had inspired the painter. Hearing Dante's poetry read in the original speeded Delacroix's execution.

The best head in my picture of Dante was brushed in with tremendous speed and excitement while Pierret was reading me a canto from Dante, one which I knew already, but to which he gave an energy that quite electrified me. The head is that of the man facing you in the background, the one trying to climb into the boat, who has thrown his arm over the gunwale.²¹

Sometimes Delacroix felt that an attempt by the painter to express his vision first in words might serve as a useful introduction to its realization in painting. At the time he was working on his Massacre of Scio, he wrote in his Journal:

I believe and have thought on various occasions that it would be an excellent thing to warm up to one's work by writing verses with or without rhyme on the subject one intends to paint, in order to ensure getting off to a really fiery start when one tackles the painting itself.²²

The aim of Delacroix to communicate strong emotions and his reliance on literary sources for his subjects have important consequences for his art as a painter and introduce into his works certain technical innovations which tend to break down the sharp distinction between art and literature.

Since the painter must rely on the plastic recreation of familiar objects as a means of translating his feeling, it is obvious that this cannot be achieved through a slavish imitation of their forms and colours. The objects themselves serving as a bridge between the mind of the artist and that of his spectators must undergo transformations and be endowed with a power to translate the inner life. An avowed enemy of realism, Delacroix does not, however, deny the claims of nature as a necessary model. It remains an eternal source of inspiration to which the artist must ceaselessly return. But in addition to the direct impressions of the realistic painter, there must be added something which is not just a characteristic of personality, but which embodies the sum total of the artist's outlook. Delacroix believes, furthermore, that the experiences we gain through the senses are not our only source of knowledge. We are all gifted with innate perceptions which transcend the natural world. The painter must interpret these perceptions in terms of what he can see about him. Objects in painting become the symbols of a visual language which not only appeal to the eyes but also speak to the soul. Delacroix reminds us that “the goal of the artist is not to reproduce objects exactly. He would be stopped immediately by the impossibility of doing so. There are many common effects which escape painting entirely and which must be translated by equivalents.”²³

What are these equivalents? A consideration of Delacroix' approach to his art may throw some light on this question. Nature, he has told us, must always be the starting point. And indeed he constantly refers to it, drawing ceaselessly from its treasure house. But these sketches are in no way intended to be finished products; they are only a means of storing up in the painter's inner eye a stock of plastic references, a method of gathering a dictionary of forms and colours which he is to use later to create his great imaginative works. This admittedly is the normal procedure of any painter. The originality of Delacroix lies more in the use he did not make of these sketches. Seldom does he attempt to transpose them as such in his larger works. He has the utmost contempt for artists who consider a painting to be merely an enlargement of a sketch from nature.

Referring to a painting by Courbet in which the artist depicts a woman bathing, he says: “When Courbet painted the background of his woman bathing, he copied it scrupulously from a study I saw beside his easel. Nothing could be colder; it is simply a patchwork.”²⁴ Delacroix avoids this practice at all costs. Once inspiration fires his imagination, all immediate reference to an actual scene or model is forgotten and only the emotion which prompts the picture in the mind is important. This inner picture at the outset is seldom clearly defined. The preparatory sketches for a finished work reveal on the contrary a quest for the needed result, a slow process of crystallization of the forms, beginning frequently with a central core around which the many aspects of the painting evolve, always in close participation with the inner movements which dictate them. Here again each successive attempt is only an approach to the final result, each sketch being discarded for another, and with each effort the inner vision grows stronger and stronger in clarity and in intensity to be finally cast on to the canvas in a heat of creation. This method may not always have been followed so closely, but it was the ideal, Delacroix professed.

Painting, then, truly becomes not a copy of reality but rather a translation of emotions following a method which Baudelaire calls a memory technique. This approach to painting has close affinities with the approach of the writer to his own art. The painter like the writer acquires a language of his own, made up not of words but of forms and colours which are not as important in themselves as the emotions they serve to translate. The expression of this particular language becomes an instinctive and spontaneous manifestation accompanying the inner process of thought and feeling. And because it is primarily a language it will tend, just as the language of the writer, to suggest rather than show the object in its entirety. Although Delacroix in his larger works seldom exploits to any degree the resources offered by an incomplete representation of his subject, he was well aware of its advantages. He writes in his Journal:

… I remembered something I wrote in my Journal about a fortnight ago, on the effect of the sketch compared with the finished work. I said that the sketch for a picture, the early stage of a great building, a ruin, in fact every work of imagination of which portions are missing, must have a stronger effect on the mind in proportion to what our imaginations have to supply in order to gain an impression of the work.²⁵

By leaving parts of the painting incomplete therefore a closer communication is established between the mind of the artist and that of the beholder; the actual parts serving as reminders of those which are missing.

What has just been said concerning the general treatment of form by Delacroix can also be applied to his use of colours. Here again, the basic aim is not to transpose colours such as they may be seen in nature but to use them as a means of translating emotions. This explains why so many people, unaware of the real intentions of the artist, find his colours unnatural and exaggerated. Just as he invents a language of forms, Delacroix invents a language of colours which have an expressive rather than representational value, where each tone corresponds to a shade of sentiment. Each subject arouses in the painter a general emotion and prompts a dominant colour which is the key to the painting. This colour then decides the choice and disposition of all the others. Delacroix again tells us:

There is obviously a particular tone assigned to some part of the painting which becomes the key and governs the others. Everyone knows that yellow, orange, red, inspire and represent ideas of joy, wealth, glory and love; but there are thousands of yellow or red atmospheres and that all the others will be logically affected to a degree proportional to the dominant atmosphere.²⁶

Faced from the beginning of his career with the problem of forcing colours to serve an essentially expressive function, and inspired by the example of English painters such as Lawrence and Constable, Delacroix introduces into the art of painting, in France, revolutionary ideas and devices which have opened the way since for many contemporary trends in painting. Rejecting all the dull colours which characterized the academic art of his time, he begins to use such dazzling tones as cobalt blue, emerald green, madder-red and, later, vermilion, zinc yellow, or cadmium. Not satisfied with the results he then resorts to setting pure primary colours side by side in small touches, fused together at a distance by the eye into the desired effect. Here again he invites the beholder to a closer visual as well as mental participation in his work. These touches of paint themselves by their configuration and relative disposition on the canvas are not just a means of applying colours with the sole intention of suggesting tones and shapes, but have a power to translate feeling.

Many masters have avoided showing the touch thinking no doubt that by so doing they were coming closer to nature where there is of course no such thing. Touch is merely one of several means that contribute toward rendering a thought in painting.²⁷

One is reminded of the full use which the impressionists and Van Gogh will make later of this technique.

Such are then, very generally, the equivalents which Delacroix uses to achieve his goal—namely to force painting to become a suitable medium for the translation of emotions. These equivalents include a new conception of the rôle of the painter, a technique of execution based essentially on memory rather than on direct observation, an exploitation of the resources offered by the unfinished sketch and the fullest use of colours for their expressive value. Through the use of these equivalents not only does Delacroix identify closely painting and writing but he also renews the artistic inspiration of modern times by making the personal emotions of the artist the raison d'être and justification of all true art.

Baudelaire, one of the first to recognize Delacroix' original contribution to the art of painting, pays this supreme tribute to him in his “Art Romantique:”

“But, you will doubtless say—what is this indescribable mysterious thing which Delacroix, to the glory of our century, has translated better than any one else. It is the indivisible, the impalpable, the dream, the life, the soul, and he does it with no other means than line and colour; he does it better than anyone else with the perfection of a consummate painter, the precision of a subtle writer, the eloquence of an impassioned musician.”²⁸

Notes

1. Journal de Delacroix, Nouvelle Edition par André Joubin, 3 vols. (Paris, 1950). Translations are mine.

2. Journal, September 13, 14, 15, 1855.

3. Journal, May 9, 1824.

4. Journal, June 1, 1853.

5. Journal, June 1, 1853.

6. Michel Florisoone, Eugène Delacroix (Paris, Collection de maîtres, Les Editions Braun et Cie.).

7. Journal, April 25, 1824.

8. Journal, October 20, 1853.

9. Journal, May 7, 1824.

10. Journal, January 13, 1857.

11. Journal, May 8, 1853.

12. Journal, May 9, 1824.

13. Journal, May 11, 1824.

14. Journal, April 11, 1824.

15. Dante, The Inferno, translation by John Ciardi (The New American Library, 1954).

16. Canto II, lxiii.

17. Letter to J. B. Pierret, 18 June 1825, Delacroix, Correspondance générale, ed. A. Joubin (Paris, 1935-8).

18. Johann Peter Eckermann, Words of Goethe (New York, 1933).

19. Journal, May 14, 1824.

20. Journal, May 14, 1824.

21. Journal, December 24, 1853.

22. Journal, April 25, 1824.

23. Oeuvres littéraires [Ed. Elie Faure. 2 vols. Paris: G. Crès, 1923], I, 60.

24. Journal, October 17, 1853.

25. Journal, May 9, 1853.

26. Reported by Baudelaire in L'Œuvre et la vie de Delacroix (Baudelaire, Œuvres Complètes, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1956), 860.

27. Journal, January 13, 1857.

28. L'Œuvre et la vie de Delacroix, Œuvres Complètes (Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1956), 856.