With his decorative paintings in the Palais Bourbon and the Palais du Luxembourg complete at the end of 1847, Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863) had already been discussing his next major project, but that wasn’t commissioned until March 1850. This gave him a break from the physical demands of painting ceilings, and a chance to complete more easel paintings.
Among these was the finished version derived from this study of The Lamentation, for the Salon of 1848.
He also completed a series of floral paintings. These weren’t his first, but this period saw him concentrating on five for the Salon of the following year. Although paintings of flowers seldom received acclaim or awards, there were several keen collectors in a market that Henri Fantin-Latour was to develop during the 1860s.
Two of these five canvases were ready for the Salon of 1849, one of which is his Basket of Flowers Overturned in a Park (1848-49). As a platform for his colourist style, they were highly successful and reaped praise from the critics.
The last of the group to be completed was Vase of Flowers on a Console (1848-50), presented with the other two at the Exposition Universelle of 1855, to further praise.
Delacroix also experimented with mixed media almost a century before that became popular. He painted this detailed Bouquet of Flowers in 1849-50 using the combination of watercolour, gouache and pastel on paper. Others before and since brushed their pastels, and several wetted them, but this combination was well in advance of its time.
Although not yet commissioned for further decorative work, he started skying to assemble studies for later use in his monumental works.
This Study of the Sky at Sunset painted in pastels in 1849 is now in the Louvre.
The Met in New York has this slightly later pastel Sunset from about 1850.
When he was in Paris, one of Delacroix’s favourite activities was to visit the zoo at the city’s Jardin des Plantes and sketch the big cats there. He sometimes used pastels for this purpose, and this painting of a Tiger Preparing to Spring from about 1850 demonstrates his mastery of the medium.
He still tackled some of his favourite narratives, including Romeo and Juliet at the Tomb of the Capulets from about 1850. This shows Romeo holding the apparently dead body of his lover in his arms, from William Shakespeare’s play Romeo and Juliet.
His commission for the Galerie d’Apollon in the Louvre wasn’t as ambitious or technically demanding as those for the two Palais, but was a greater artistic challenge. This gallery had been left unfinished since the seventeenth century, and its state had deteriorated badly before its recent restoration. It was still missing its central ceiling painting, which had to sit alongside paintings by Charles Le Brun and others. For its subject, Delacroix chose the myth of Apollo slaying Python, drawn from the first book of Ovid’s Metamorphoses.
One of the creatures created after the Flood was the huge and monstrous serpent Python, which brought fear to mankind. Ovid writes that the god Apollo “destroyed the monster with a myriad darts” from his bow. To celebrate the death of Python, Apollo instituted the Pythian games, but because the laurel had not yet been created, its victors were awarded crowns of oak leaves, rather than laurels.
Apollo Vanquishing the Python (1850-51) shows Apollo at the centre, in his sun chariot, with another arrow poised in his bow and ready to strike Python, at the bottom of the image. Apollo’s sister Diana flies behind him offering her quiver of arrows. Minerva and Mercury rush to kill other monsters, Hercules strikes them with his club, Vulcan chases night and vapours, while Boreas and the winds blow the waters and clouds away. Victory is descending to crown Apollo, and Iris unfurls her scarf as a mark of their triumph over the flood and monsters.
This proved so successful that Delacroix was commissioned to paint a ceiling, eleven lunettes and eight surrounding panels for the Hôtel de Ville (City Hall) in Paris in 1852-54. These were tragically destroyed by fire during the Commune in 1871.
Delacroix also painted a few landscapes in these years, among them his justly famous The Sea from the Heights of Dieppe probably from 1852. Although often used as an example of a painting in which he anticipated Impressionism, it’s closer to the ‘memoires’ painted by Corot than it is to the later work of Monet or Pissarro.
References
Barthélémy Jobert (2018) Delacroix, new and expanded edn, Princeton UP. ISBN 978 0 691 18236 0.
Patrick Noon and Christopher Riopelle (2015) Delacroix and the Rise of Modern Art, National Gallery and Yale UP. ISBN 978 1 857 09575 3.
Lucy Norton (translator) (1995) The Journal of Eugène Delacroix, 3rd edn, Phaedon. ISBN 978 0 7148 3359 0.
Arlette Sérullaz (2004) Delacroix, Louvre Drawing Gallery, 5 Continents. ISBN 978 8 874 39105 9.
Beth S Wright (editor) (2001) The Cambridge Companion to Delacroix, Cambridge UP. ISBN 978 0 521 65077 1.