his pictures appear as devoid of brilliancy as those of the Venetians. Yet, when he first exhibited, he was reproached for his raucous tones. The critics called his Massacre de Scio the “massacre of painting,” and added, “il court sur les toits.” His men and women, the shadows of whose flesh were coloured with blues and greens, were stigmatised “corpses,” and he was accused of having used the morgue for his studio.
All this mattered little. Delacroix’s real significance as an artist lay in his drawing which was his greatest asset. What raised him above the general run of painters, baroque and otherwise, was his slight talent for composition. Often in his Journal he speaks of the “balance of lines.” He knew that with the masters of the Renaissance it was common property, and that modern painting had lost it; and he strove to reintroduce it into art. But he never got beyond the simplest synthesis of the least compounded of Rubens’s figure pieces. For instance, in the Bataille de Taillebourg—an excellent example of his dramatic method—it will be noted that the canvas opens at the bottom-centre to form a triangle of struggling forms, and that in the breach thus made the rearing charger looms white. The identical composition can be found in La Justice, La Liberté, the Janissaires à l’Attaque, La Lutte de Jacob avec l’Ange, the Enlèvement de Rébecca and the Entrée des Croisés à Jérusalem. In this last canvas, his most masterful, the triangle is complicated by a curved line running inward from the centre. This picture recalls, almost to every detail, Rubens’s The Adoration of the Wise Men of the East, in the Antwerp Museum. However, it marks a great progress from the symmetricality of his toile de début, and though in it Rubens is consciously imitated—if not indeed plagiarised, Delacroix gets nearer to the spirit of Veronese than to that of the Flemish master.
Among the paintings wherein the simple, three-sided composition does not appear, the most notable are his animal pictures (in which he substituted the S design) and those canvases in which his momentary admiration for others (as for Veronese in the Retour de Christophe Colomb, and for the Dutch in Cromwell au Château de Windsor) made him forget himself. Even this primitive comprehension of linear balance had passed out of French painting with the death of Poussin, and its reapparition in Delacroix is analogous to the impetus toward rhythm which was given to the stiff Byzantine painting of Venice by Nicolo di Pietro and Giovanni da Bologna in the fourteenth century.
In Rubens we find turbulent movement, as great as in life itself, organised in such a way that all the emotions, exalted, depressive, dramatic, are expressed. But in Delacroix there is merely co-ordinated action. And this action, even in the busiest centres of his canvases, is more suggestive of unrest than of movement. However, the real cause for his failure to express a spirit as modern as Rubens’s lay in his inability to understand the opposition in rhythmic line-balance of three dimensions which is to be found in even the slightest of Rubens’s canvases. His details are always interesting, but he never succeeded in welding them into a sequacious and interrelated whole. His high gift of invention was inadequate equipment for so difficult a feat. Compare Rembrandt’s exquisite bathing girl in the London National Gallery and Delacroix’s La Grèce Expirant sur les Ruines de Missolonghi. In technical treatment these two paintings are not unlike, but the scattered feeling and lack of plastic concentration in the latter emphasises the superior force of the Dutchman.
Delacroix’s work fell between flat decoration and deep painting. Although in his small drawings and details he exhibits a genuine feeling for volume, as his Lion Déchirant un Cadavre shows, his constant refinements of reasoning nearly always resulted in his form being flattened out until it sometimes became commonplace. Simple balance of line defined the limits of his ability for organisation. If he had carried out in other pictures the compositional elements of his Piéta, which had distinct movement, his work would have taken a higher place in the history of art. In many canvases his seeming fullness of form is only a richness of line—a richness, however, which had seldom been found in painting since Masaccio. This voluptuousness in Delacroix (analogous to Wagner’s music) results from the balance of large dark and light masses—the fullness of chiaroscuro. It is particularly appreciable in La Justice de Trajan, La Captivité de Babylone, Repos (reminiscent of Goya’s La Maja Desnuda) and his animal compositions.
Delacroix’s greatest deficiency lay in his inability to recognise the difference between the inventive intelligence and the imaginative instinct. Had he understood this he could have seen that his limitless ambition was incommensurate with his comparatively small capabilities. But his mind was not sufficiently open. In fact his viewpoint at times was a petty one. Even his patriotism was chauvinistic. He was rabidly anti-Teutonic and attempted to compress all the great masters of art into the French mould. He inveighed against style in painting because France had always been barren of it. He pretended to detest Wagner, his musical prototype, and ignoring the latter’s dramatic undulations, criticised him severely for his methods. Beethoven was too long for Delacroix, and Il Trovatore too complicated. However, he had a profound admiration for Titian and Mozart; and in these preferences we have the man’s psychology. Both were great classicists, but both lacked that genuine and magistral fullness which was the propre of Beethoven and Michelangelo.
Delacroix’s thoughts were on deep things rather than deep in themselves. Among the romanticists he was at home: all his life Byron and Walter Scott provided him with themes. And though he had sufficient foresight to see the hopeless trend of the painting of his day, and combated it, he did not advance. His muse was the corpse of Venetian art. He was the brake which put an end to the reactionary tendencies of art. His discoveries did not reach fruition until Impressionism, twenty years after his death.
In all his struggles destiny seemed to conspire to bring about his fame. In 1824, the very year he brought colour into his painting, Géricault, who gave promise of outstripping him, died. Constable and Turner came forward with their achievements. David’s influence had died out, and the painter himself was an exile in Brussels. Fromentin tells us that Géricault helped paint Delacroix’s first canvas. Certain it is that several of the great Englishmen painted some of his second. This, no doubt, taught Delacroix much. In 1827 the government ordered Justinien Composant les Institutes. All France rallied round his standard. He was decorated by Louis Philippe; and at the age of thirty he was proclaimed a great master by one of the leading critics of the day.
From the first he had had the backing of men respected as authorities. But though they helped make his position tenable, they obfuscated his true significance by their purely literary appreciations. Gautier, Dumas, Baudelaire, Stendhal and Merimée—there was none whose temperament was not either romantic or idealistic. They could not see that, though he strove with them for modernity of expression, his language was unmodern. However, Ernest Chesneau, Théophile Silvestre, Eugène Véron and C. P. Landon have all given us side-lights on his methods, and, in this, their expositions are of value.
But, though the men of letters did not understand him thoroughly, several of his fellow painters recognised his eclecticism. Among them was Thomas Couture who, in his highly instructive booklet, Méthodes et Entretiens d’Atelier, had the audacity to point out the painter’s selective habits. In the main his charge was just. Delacroix’s first canvas contains influences of both Rubens and Michelangelo. His second picture echoes Rubens, the Venetians and Goya. Later came more prominent evidences of Titian and Veronese. Delacroix was museum-bred. He absorbed impressions avidly, and did his best work only after he had undergone an intellectual experience. Had his art been truly expressive of all that was within him, he would have been in turn—diluted, to be sure—a Giotto, a Caravaggio, a Rubens, a Rembrandt. He felt the call of these men, but instead of halting at appreciation, he tried to use them. But the old masters, like the lords of the earth, are not amenable to high-handed demands.
The diversity of his pursuits, which sprang from a desire to compete with Leonardo da Vinci, smacks of the dilettante. His great mistake was that he did not separate his capabilities from his desires. Had he done so he would have produced small figure pieces of gem-like richness and voluminous composition. Enthusiasm is not the proper equipment for extended labour. It burns out too soon, and is kept alive only by quick and brilliant results. For this reason his pictures are viewed to
