Ferdinand Victor Eugène Delacroix
(April
26, 1798
– August
13, 1863)
was the most important of the French
Romantic
painters.[1]
Delacroix's use of expressive brushstrokes and his study
of the optical effects of colour profoundly shaped the
work of the Impressionists,
while his passion for the exotic inspired the artists of
the Symbolist
movement. A fine lithographer,
Delacroix illustrated various works of William
Shakespeare, the Scottish writer Sir
Walter Scott, and the German writer Johann
Wolfgang von Goethe.
In contrast to the Neoclassical
perfectionism of his chief rival Ingres,
Delacroix took for his inspiration the art of Rubens
and painters of the Venetian Renaissance,
with an attendant emphasis on color and movement rather
than clarity of outline and carefully modeled form.
Dramatic and romantic content characterized the central
themes of his maturity, and led him not to the classical
models of Greek and Roman art, but to travel in North
Africa, in search of the exotic.[2]
Friend and spiritual heir to Théodore
Géricault, Delacroix was also inspired by Byron,
with whom he shared a strong identification with the
"forces of the sublime", of nature in often
violent action.[3]
However, Delacroix was given neither
to sentimentality nor bombast, and his Romanticism was
that of an individualist. In the words of Baudelaire,
"Delacroix was passionately in love with passion,
but coldly determined to express passion as clearly as
possible.