Imaginary interview with Eugène Delacroix
by Charactorium · Eugène Delacroix (1798 — 1863) · Visual Arts · 5 min read
It is in the studio on the place Furstenberg, in the spring of 1862, that Charles Baudelaire meets Eugène Delacroix, frail in his dark frock coat, a Moroccan blanket thrown over the armchair. Light falls from above on a canvas in progress, the smell of oil and turpentine saturates the room. The two men have known each other for years — the poet defends the master's color against the proponents of drawing — and Baudelaire comes that day less as a critic than as an accomplice, to make the painter say what his paintings keep silent.
—Master, when you received me here recently, you showed me those notebooks brought back from Morocco in 1832. What did your eye see there?
You remember, Charles, that I could not tear my hand from those sheets — seven notebooks, and thirty years later I still draw from them. I accompanied the Comte de Mornay on a mission to Sultan Moulay Abd er-Rahman, and in Meknès, during the audience, I understood that the Ancients lived there, before my eyes, draped in light. Before, I painted after David and marbles; there, truth walked in the street. Color was no longer an ornament; it was the thing itself. My Women of Algiers, everything I have done of the Orient, comes from these sketches taken in haste, with a beating heart.
Before, I painted after marbles; there, truth walked in the street.
—They say you noted even the exact shades of costumes. Do you consider this concern for the right note a science or an instinct?
Both, my friend, and that is the whole secret. I wrote in the margins of my watercolors the precise color of a caftan, the violet shadow of a wall under the great sun. For memory lies, you see, and the Paris studio is gray. What one has not noted from life, one invents falsely. I brought back from Tangier the certainty that shadows are never black but colored, shot through with reflections. You, who look at my canvases with more insight than the Salon juries, know that this luminosity cannot be improvised: it is conquered notebook in hand, kneeling before reality.
Shadows are never black but colored, shot through with reflections.
—Let us speak of that canvas known to all Paris. In July 1830, on the barricades, what took hold of your brush, you, the man of the salons?
I wrote then to my friend Soulier that I had begun a modern subject, a barricade — and that if I had not fought for the fatherland, at least I would paint for it. That is the foundation, Charles. I was not a fighter; my health forbade it. But those Three Glorious Days stirred something in me that no ancient subject could awaken. I wanted to raise Liberty above the paving stones, to mix the street urchin of Paris and the bare-chested worker, to make an allegory rise from the midst of very real smoke. I was reproached for that woman being too common. But a clean, marmoreal Liberty would have been just another plaster figure.
If I did not fight for the fatherland, at least I will paint for it.
—That Liberty has long slept out of sight. Do you suffer that such an ardent work is kept aside, my dear master?
A painting that disturbs is always a painting that is hidden, you know that better than anyone, you who are prosecuted for verses. Regimes fear that tricolor flag brandished by a woman of the people; depending on political winds, they exhibit it or put it away in the attic. I have learned not to be too upset. A work lives its own life, beyond the favor of ministers. What matters to me is that one day a young man will stand before it and feel the same thrill that seized me in the street. The rest — the walls where it hangs — belongs to men of power, not to painters.
A painting that disturbs is always a painting that is hidden.
—You are crowned head of Romanticism, and yet you once wrote to me that you consider yourself a pure classic. Where does this misunderstanding come from, Eugène?
It is the most persistent of all, and it has pursued me all my life. I was brought up in great respect for Raphael and the old masters — Rubens, Veronese, whom I went to copy at the Louvre for whole days. And yet I am classed among the innovators, like a barbarian come to burn the temple! The truth is, I revere tradition too much to fall asleep in it. The classical is not a corpse to be recited; it is a living source from which one draws to express one's own time. Those who set me against the Ancients have understood neither them nor me. I am not the enemy of drawing: I only refuse that it stifles color.
The classical is not a corpse to be recited; it is a living source.
—Your quarrel with Ingres is famous even at dinner parties. Did this rivalry wound you, or spur you on, tell me frankly?
Both, as always. They made us into two enemy banners, line against color, and they reveled in our outbursts. One evening, in a salon, the argument was so heated that he left the room demanding the windows be opened. I do not hold grudges long, Charles. Ingres is a great artist who fights the wrong battle; he believes drawing alone carries truth, whereas I hold that color also thinks. These clashes hardened me, it is true, and sometimes isolated me. But they forced me to know precisely what I wanted. A painter without an adversary falls asleep on his easy successes.
Ingres believes drawing alone carries truth; I hold that color also thinks.
—Let us return to the Salon of 1824, to the Massacres of Chios. It is said that you reworked everything upon discovering an Englishman near your canvas.
Constable, yes — a shock from which I never recovered. His landscapes were hung not far from my large painting of the Greeks massacred at Chios, and the brilliance of his greens, the vibration of his light made me ashamed of my own background, which suddenly seemed dull and leaden. A few days before the opening, I reworked a large part of that background to brighten it, to make it throb with that palpitation the Englishman had captured. People cry scandal before that painting, they call me the arsonist of the Salon. But no one knows that I owe that flame to a landscape painter from London glimpsed by chance.
The brilliance of his greens made me ashamed of my own background, suddenly dull and leaden.
—You speak of vibration, of palpitation. Is there a secret law behind these color harmonies that make the critics cry out so?
There is a science, yes, which chemists are beginning to formulate — that simultaneous contrast that Chevreul speaks of: two complementary colors side by side reinforce each other, red enlivens green, and the eye trembles with pleasure. But I did not learn it from books, Charles; I felt it at the tip of the brush before it was explained to me. A painting, you see, must first be a feast for the eye. That does not mean there should be no reason in it — but reason never saves a painting that offends the eye, just as it does not save a verse that wounds the ear. You, poet, know that instinctively.
A painting must first be a feast for the eye.
—You have kept your Journal for so many years. What do you seek, in the evening, in those pages that no one will read in your lifetime?
I seek myself, quite simply. Since 1822 I have confided to these notebooks my doubts, my anger at the juries, my reflections on music and books as much as on painting. Speech flies away, and my memory weakens with my ailing body. Writing in the evening is taking stock before sleep, untangling what the day in the studio has left confused. I do not compose for the gallery — it is an intimate mirror, sometimes cruel. You, who handle the pen better than I, understand this need to pull oneself together through words when color, all day long, has exhausted you.
Writing in the evening is taking stock before sleep.
—You are said to be a man of the evening, a regular at concerts. Did your friendship with Chopin count as much as painting, my dear Eugène?
It counted in a different way, which nourished painting without merging with it. When Frédéric played for a few close friends, I forgot my canvases, my quarrels, even my cough. His music taught me more about color than any treatise: those modulations, those transitions from one shade to another without jarring, that is what I wanted on the canvas. The evening returned me to myself — the opera, the salons of George Sand, opera glasses in hand in a box. My fragile health made me avoid excess, but not beauty. A painter who does not listen to music deprives himself of half his art. Frédéric knew that, and his loss left me very alone.
His music taught me more about color than any treatise.
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.