Imaginary interview with Eugène Delacroix
by Charactorium · Eugène Delacroix (1798 — 1863) · Visual Arts · 5 min read
Place Furstenberg, a winter morning in 1862. The oblique light falls on unfinished canvases and the large easel; in a corner, Jenny Le Guillou brings a light tea. Eugène Delacroix, in a dark frock coat, his voice tired from coughing, agrees to look back on forty years of color and turmoil.
—You are presented everywhere as the leader of Romanticism. Does this label suit you?
It makes me smile, and sometimes grimace. You see: I wore out my eyes and knees at the Louvre, copying Rubens and Veronese, I was raised in great respect for Raphael. And yet they rank me among the innovators as if I had set the museums on fire! I say it outright to my friend Thoré: 'I am a pure classic. I was raised in great respect for Raphael and the old masters. And yet they rank me among the innovators!' They made me a standard-bearer, a sulfur that Ingres claims to smell as soon as I enter a room. But a battle of cockades, Romanticism against the Academy of Fine Arts, hardly interests me. What occupies me is that a canvas lives.
They made me a standard-bearer, a sulfur that Ingres claims to smell as soon as I enter a room.
—This rivalry with Ingres, how did you experience it?
With weariness more than hatred, believe me. The story was spread of a dinner where he left demanding that the windows be opened, because it smelled of sulfur — meaning: me. It's piquant, and in the end almost flattering. But we defend two opposing religions: he swears by contour, by pure line inherited from the Academy, and I believe that color does not wait for drawing to give it permission to breathe. Seven times I knocked at the door of the Academy of Fine Arts before they let me in, in 1857. Seven refusals! They punish for a long time those who disturb the order of the Salon.
—Let's go back to July 1830. Do you remember the impulse that drove you to paint the barricade?
How could I forget it? The Three Glorious Days had just thrown Charles X to the ground, the cobblestones were still smoking. I had not taken up a gun — my health, my character did not lead me to it — but another fever held me. I wrote to my friend Soulier, in October 1830: 'I have begun a modern subject, a barricade… and if I have not conquered for the homeland, at least I will paint for her.' That is all. That woman in the Phrygian cap striding over the dead, brandishing the tricolor, is neither quite a goddess nor quite a daughter of the people: she is both. Liberty Leading the People was my way of mounting the barricade.
I had not taken up a gun, but another fever held me: to paint for the homeland, failing to conquer for it.
—What would you say about the reception of this canvas, considered too popular by some?
It was looked at as one looks at a riot: with a mixture of fascination and dread. An allegory that smells of gunpowder and sweat, a Liberty with bare feet and uncovered armpits — that was not done in well-bred history painting. The state bought it, then had it removed from the walls, judging the barricade too flammable for the walls of a palace. Insurrections are willingly put in the attic once the fever has subsided. But a canvas is patient: it waits for eyes to mature. I knew, while painting it, that I was not painting a news item, but a cry that would last longer than I.
—In 1832, you left for Morocco. What changed in you there?
Everything, and all at once. In Tangier, stepping off the ship, the light struck me like a revelation: the whites are dazzling, the shadows colored, the haiks draped like living togas. In Meknès, I attended the audience of Sultan Moulay Abd er-Rahman, and I understood that the antiquity that David sought in plaster casts, I saw walking in the street. I noted in my sketchbooks, that February: 'The Romans and Greeks are here, at my door.' I filled seven sketchbooks with drawings and watercolors, recording the exact shade of a burnous, of a sky. I drew on them for thirty years.
The antiquity that David sought in plaster casts, I saw walking in the streets of Meknès.
—How did this journey subsequently nourish your Orientalist paintings?
My seven sketchbooks became a reserve I drew from like a storeroom of colors. Women of Algiers in Their Apartment was born from that memory: a filtered light, fabrics, the intimacy of an interior glimpsed for a moment and reconstituted in my Parisian studio. What amateurs call Orientalism was for me neither an exotic decor nor a fantasy: it was a lesson in optical truth. There, I unlearned the recipes of the studio. I understood that shadow is never gray but inhabited by reflections, and that the most accurate color arises from the proximity of others. A hundred canvases came out of those few weeks.
—You speak of colors that reinforce each other. Where does this science come from?
From a lucky chance, first. At the Salon of 1824, my Scenes from the Massacres of Chios were waiting to be hung when I noticed, nearby, the landscapes of the Englishman Constable. The brilliance of his greens struck me: he achieved them not with a single tone, but with a host of small juxtaposed touches. In a few days I reworked the entire background of my canvas to make it vibrate. Later, the chemist Chevreul gave a learned name to what I felt: simultaneous contrast, two complementary colors that exalt each other side by side. My palette became a laboratory. I have never ceased to believe that a painting must first be, as I wrote, 'a feast for the eye.'
Chevreul gave a learned name to what I already felt under the brush.
—Were you reproached for this audacity of color at the expense of drawing?
Constantly. For the Academy, drawing is the probity of art and color a suspect adornment, almost a feminine coquetry. The Death of Sardanapalus, in 1827, unleashed criticism: they spoke of chromatic orgy, disorder, violence. But the apparent disorder obeys a law. When I place a red against a green, it is not to stun, it is so that each sings louder. The paint tubes that are now manufactured have moreover liberated me: I carry my colors everywhere, I work quickly, while the sensation is fresh. Drawing holds the framework, yes; but it is color that makes the heart beat.
—You have kept a Journal since your youth. Why this need to write every day?
Because the hand that paints and the hand that write seek the same thing: to let nothing escape. Since 1822, almost every evening, before going to bed, I record an idea about color, a quarrel, a melody heard. This Journal is my most trusted confidant — it knows my doubts, my anger against Ingres, my wonderments. I also note my evenings: a recital given at Chopin's, whose friendship is more precious to me than many honors, or the conversation of George Sand one afternoon in the studio. When the cough keeps me down, these pages keep me company. Perhaps one day my thoughts will be better read in it than in my paintings.
The hand that paints and the hand that writes seek the same thing: to let nothing escape.
—What does one of your days look like, here, at Place Furstenberg?
Regulated like a score, despite the fatigue. I get up early to capture the morning light; Jenny, my housekeeper, makes sure I do not skip my meager breakfast — my chest can no longer bear excesses. The afternoon belongs to work, in front of the large easel, sometimes until exhaustion. If I have to paint the angels of Saint-Sulpice, I am taken by carriage to the chapel: this Jacob Wrestling with the Angel costs me my last strength, and I consider it a testament. In the evening, a concert, the opera, then the Journal. I settled here in 1857 to live very close to that church — the work now dictates even my address.
This imaginary interview was generated by artificial intelligence from sources documented in Eugène Delacroix's profile. It dramatises what the figure might have said based on what we know about them, but does not constitute attested historical testimony. For primary sources and factual documentation, refer to the full profile.