Eugène Delacroix

A minister's son in Guérin's studio

Delacroix was born on 26 April 1798 at Charenton-Saint-Maurice, just outside Paris, the youngest of four children. His father, Charles Delacroix, was a politician who had served as France's minister of foreign affairs and later as ambassador to Holland; he died when Eugène was six. His mother, Victoire, was the daughter of the cabinetmaker Jean-François Oeben, whose furniture had gone to the court at Versailles. Eugène went to the Lycée Impérial, the Paris school now called the Lycée Louis-le-Grand, and made friendships there that lasted his whole life.

His mother died in 1814, when he was sixteen, and the money went with her. His uncle Henri-François Riesener, himself a painter, got him a place in 1815 in the Paris studio of Pierre-Narcisse Guérin, one of the established teachers of the day. In the same studio was a slightly older student who mattered more to him than the teacher did: Théodore Géricault, who was then building the enormous shipwreck picture that would become The Raft of the Medusa. Delacroix posed for one of its figures. He was twenty-one when the finished canvas went on show in 1819, and he had seen at close range what a young painter could do to an audience with a recent catastrophe and a very large canvas.

Salon warfare

Everything in a French painter's career then ran through the Salon, the state's official exhibition in Paris, which was where reputations, government commissions and sales were made or lost. Delacroix arrived there in 1822, at twenty-four, with Dante and Virgil in Hell, also called The Barque of Dante: two poets crossing a black lake while the damned claw at the boat. The Massacre at Chios followed at the Salon of 1824, painted out of the news of the Greek war of independence, when Ottoman troops killed and enslaved the Greek population of the island of Chios. In 1827 came The Death of Sardanapalus, an Assyrian king having his women and horses killed around him as his palace falls.

These pictures made him the standard-bearer of Romanticism and gave the classical school something to aim at. The argument between the two was about what a painting was for. The classical side, whose leading figure was the painter Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, held that drawing came first: a clear, firm outline, calm figures built on Greek and Roman models, everything subordinate to line. Delacroix put colour first, and with it movement, violence and the brushmark left visible. The quarrel was carried on in the press and at the Salon for thirty years, and it is the reason so much nineteenth-century writing about French painting is organised as a contest between line and colour.

Liberty Leading the People

In July 1830 the government of King Charles X suspended press freedom and rewrote the voting rules, and Paris rose. The fighting lasted three days, the king lost his throne, and the French remember the episode as the Trois Glorieuses, the three glorious days. Delacroix painted it almost immediately. The Louvre, which owns the picture, describes it as showing the three-day uprising of July 1830 when Parisians took to the streets to defend their freedoms.

What he did with it was new. In the centre of the canvas he put an allegorical figure of Liberty, a woman carrying the tricolour flag over a barricade, and rather than the smooth goddess a classical painter would have supplied, the Louvre notes, he made her a sensual and vibrant woman of the people. Around her he set the men who had actually fought: a boy with two pistols, a factory worker, a man in a top hat. Real corpses lie in the foreground. It went to the Salon of 1831, and it is the single image by which most people know both the July Revolution and Delacroix.

Morocco, and the walls of the state

In 1832 Delacroix joined a French diplomatic mission to Morocco led by the Comte de Mornay. He filled notebooks throughout the journey, and the trip supplied him for the rest of his life: more than seventy paintings with Moroccan subjects came out of it over the following three decades.

From the mid-1830s the French state gave him its buildings, and mural painting took over his working life. He decorated the Salon du Roi — the King's Room — at the Palais Bourbon, the seat of the lower house of parliament, from 1834, and went on to the ceiling of its library in 1837. In the mid-1840s he painted the library of the Palais du Luxembourg, where the upper house sits. In the early 1850s he was given the ceiling of the Galerie d'Apollon at the Louvre, the long gilded room built for Louis XIV. This is the part of his career least visible to visitors, because most of it is inside working government buildings, and it is the part he cared about most.

Saint-Sulpice, and the move to the rue de Furstemberg

In 1847 he was commissioned to decorate a chapel in Saint-Sulpice, the enormous church on the Left Bank whose square is Place Saint-Sulpice. The commission was for the Chapelle des Saints-Anges, the chapel of the holy angels. He worked on it, with his assistant Pierre Andrieu, from 1849 until 1861. He painted Jacob Wrestling with the Angel on one wall and Heliodorus Driven from the Temple facing it, with Saint Michael Defeating the Devil overhead.

The work nearly beat him. By the mid-1850s he was tired and often ill, and the daily journey across Paris from his studio on the rue Notre-Dame-de-Lorette, in the 9th arrondissement, had become more than he could manage. On 28 December 1857 he moved to a ground-floor apartment at 6 rue de Furstemberg in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, a few minutes' walk from the church; a friend, the paint dealer and restorer Étienne Haro, found it for him. The deciding factor, according to the museum that now occupies the rooms, was the garden he would have to himself, where a studio could be built. He wrote in his journal of waking to see the most gracious sun on the houses opposite his window.

The chapel was inaugurated in August 1861. Earlier that year, on 12 January, he had written in his journal that for several months he had been doing a job that had restored the health he thought lost. The other recognition came at the same late hour: in January 1857 the Académie des Beaux-Arts, France's official body of artists, finally elected him, on his seventh attempt. He died in the rue de Furstemberg apartment on 13 August 1863, at sixty-five, and was buried at Père-Lachaise, the great cemetery in eastern Paris, in division 49.

Baudelaire, the Journal, and the museum in the courtyard

His reputation was built by writers as much as by painters, and by one writer above all. The poet Charles Baudelaire, who reviewed exhibitions for the Paris press, defended Delacroix throughout his own career as a critic, and in 1863, in the weeks after the painter's death, published a long essay called The Life and Work of Eugène Delacroix. A second posthumous document did the rest. Delacroix had kept detailed notebooks his whole life; they were found after his death and published as the Journal, which is where his own account of his working life survives.

The rooms themselves were saved by artists. In the late 1920s the apartment and garden studio were threatened with demolition, and a group of painters and collectors formed the Société des Amis d'Eugène Delacroix — a friends-of-Delacroix society — chaired by the painter Maurice Denis, to buy and keep them. They opened the place to the public in 1932 as the Atelier Delacroix. It became a national museum in 1971, was listed as a historic monument in 1991, and since 2004 has been run as part of the Louvre. It is still a small apartment off a quiet square with a garden behind it, which is exactly what it was on the day its tenant died in it.