As Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863) was completing his paintings in the Church of Saint-Sulpice, he painted several unusual easel works. His other significant project in these final years of his career was a drawn-out commission for the four seasons, which I’ll look at in the next article in this series.
Angelica and the Wounded Medoro (c 1860) refers to one of the many stories embedded within Ariosto’s epic poem Orlando Furioso, first published in 1516. One of its leading characters is the beautiful but pagan princess Angelica, who is frequently the target of the leading males’ amorous intentions. Eventually she falls in love with a very ordinary Moorish soldier, Medoro, and runs away with him to Cathay, leaving lovesick knights behind.
At one stage Medoro is badly wounded, and Angelica expresses her love by rescuing and caring for him, nursing him back to health. Medoro is still wearing his armour and riding his horse with his right arm in a sling. Angelica stays alongside, holding his left hand. His attendants, accompanied by a dog (foreground), lead the horse through a narrow mountain pass, heading for safety, and his eventual recovery.
Of the four faces seen in the painting, only Medoro’s shows any features at all, and it appears strangely expressionless. Angelica’s face is a formless blur of flesh colour.
At about the same time, Delacroix sketched this Hippogriff, also from Orlando Furioso.
Delacroix is perhaps the only major artist to have painted scenes from the later life in exile of the great Roman poet Ovid. As the result of a mysterious falling-out with the Emperor Augustus, Ovid was sent in exile to Tomis in the land of Scythia, at the edge of the empire on the Black Sea coast. Tomis is now the port city of Constanța in Romania.
He shows Tomis as a rural and primitive area on a narrow coastal plain amid rugged, hilly country. The Scythians follow their legendary reputation of living on mare’s milk, as demonstrated by the barebacked local milking a mare in the right foreground. When exhibited at the Salon that year, this painting drew considerable criticism for its unusual composition and the small scale of its figures. It was to prove his last Salon.
Delacroix tried again in 1862 with this variation of Ovid among the Scythians, altering the composition and enlarging its figures. Although wonderfully painterly and rich in colour, it remains romantic and embroiders the myth which Ovid had started to create in his writings from exile.
The same year, he brought an end to his long series of paintings of shipwrecks, stemming back to Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa, in Shipwreck off a Coast (1862). At last the survivors of the Don Juan have made landfall and one of them is being rescued in the left foreground (below), amid extremely loose brushstrokes.
Delacroix’s last known pastel painting is one of his finest: The Education of Achilles, painted in about 1862, and shows the ‘wisest and justest of all the centaurs’ Chiron teaching Achilles to hunt. The artist gave this to his longstanding friend George Sand.
This wasn’t his first painting of this scene; back in 1838-47 he had included it the corner of a ceiling in the library of the Palais Bourbon, and there’s a surviving graphite sketch he made for that dated to about 1844. He seems to have been painting an easel version in his studio when Sand visited him in about 1862. She took a liking to the painting, which had already been promised to someone else, so he made this replica in pastels as a gift for her.
In one of his last oil paintings, he returned to Morocco for these Arabs Skirmishing in the Mountains (1863), which also refers back to his Abduction of Rebecca from 1846 with its distant hilltop castle, and to his several depictions of Lord Byron’s poem The Giaour starting from 1826.
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.