Eugène Delacroix, the painter France hid in storage and later printed on its money

Eugène Delacroix

Photo: Eugène Delacroix / Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	April 26, 1798 Saint-Maurice
Died	August 13, 1863 (65)
Occupation	Painter
Awards	Knight of the Legion of Honour · Officer of the Legion of Honour · Commander of the Legion of Honour

For a few months in 1831, the French state owned the most famous image of its own revolution and did not dare to show it. The government of Louis-Philippe bought Liberty Leading the People for 3,000 francs, hung it briefly, and then moved it out of sight, worried that a bare-breasted woman in a Phrygian cap striding over a barricade might encourage the next riot. After the June uprising of 1832 the canvas went back to the man who had painted it. A century and a half later, France put his face on the 100-franc note.

That is the shape of Eugène Delacroix’s life in miniature. He was the leading painter of French Romanticism, a colourist whom Cézanne, Van Gogh, Signac and Picasso all claimed as an ancestor, and for most of his career the official art world treated him as a problem to be managed. He was rejected by the Académie des Beaux-Arts seven times. His critics called his paintings errors. The state kept buying them anyway.

A minister’s son, and the rumour about Talleyrand

Ferdinand-Victor-Eugène Delacroix was born on 26 April 1798 at Charenton-Saint-Maurice, just outside Paris. His mother, Victoire Oeben, was the daughter of Jean-François Oeben, cabinetmaker to Louis XV. His legal father, Charles-François Delacroix, had served as Minister of Foreign Affairs under the Directory before becoming a prefect. The man who succeeded him at the ministry, Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand, was a friend of the family, and a rumour that Talleyrand was the painter’s real father has followed Delacroix ever since. There were medical reasons to doubt that Charles-François could have fathered a child at the time, and the adult Eugène was said to resemble Talleyrand in face and temperament. Nothing has ever been proven.

His father died in 1805 and his mother in 1814, leaving him with a classical education and not much money. He studied at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand in Paris and at the lycée in Rouen, where he won prizes for drawing. In 1815 he entered the studio of Pierre-Narcisse Guérin, a painter trained in the Neoclassical manner of Jacques-Louis David. It was there that he met Théodore Géricault, seven years older and already working on the scale of ambition that would produce The Raft of the Medusa. Delacroix posed for one of the figures on that raft. Géricault’s influence on him was immediate and lasting.

1822: the Salon debut that the state bought anyway

The Death of Sardanapalus by Eugène Delacroix — Eugène Delacroix, *The Death of Sardanapalus* (1827), Musée du Louvre, Paris

Delacroix chose the subject for his first Salon entry late, in mid-January 1822, and painted it at speed to be ready for April. The Barque of Dante, also known as Dante and Virgil in Hell, shows the two poets being ferried across the Styx in the eighth canto of the Inferno, with the damned clawing at the boat. To make the colours dry faster he used varnishes that have since damaged the canvas. The critics were sharply divided, but the state bought the painting for 2,000 francs, a little less than the 2,400 he had asked, and sent it to the Musée du Luxembourg. The pattern of his whole career was set in that first transaction: loud opposition, quiet official purchase.

Two years later he went further. Scenes from the Massacres at Chios, shown at the Salon of 1824, took as its subject the Ottoman killing and enslavement of Greek civilians on the island of Chios in 1822, a contemporary atrocity that Europe was following in the newspapers. Delacroix gave the victims no heroic pose; they sit exhausted and dying in the foreground while a rider drags a woman away. The detail of a baby reaching for its dead mother’s breast was condemned as unfit for painting. At the same Salon, John Constable’s work was on show, and Delacroix is reported to have reworked the sky and distant landscape of his canvas with freer, broken strokes after seeing it. The painting won a second-class medal and the state paid 6,000 francs for it.

In 1825 he spent several months in England, where he visited Thomas Lawrence and his friend Richard Parkes Bonington and went to the theatre to see Shakespeare. English literature became one of his great sources: Byron, Walter Scott and Shakespeare fed him subjects for the rest of his life. He also produced a celebrated series of lithographs for Goethe’s Faust, published in 1828.

The Death of Sardanapalus and the word “error”

At the Salon of 1827–28 Delacroix exhibited his most violent canvas. The Death of Sardanapalus, drawn from a play by Byron, shows the besieged Assyrian king lying on an enormous red bed, watching without expression as his guards kill his concubines, servants and horses so that nothing he owns will survive him. The composition is a whirl of bodies, jewels and flesh with no stable point for the eye. The critic Étienne-Jean Delécluze wrote in the Journal des débats that the eye could not untangle the confusion of lines and colours and called the picture “a painter’s error”. The criticism was nearly unanimous. Delacroix kept the canvas in his studio for years, sold it in 1845 to an American collector, John Wilson, for 6,000 francs, and it only entered the Louvre in 1921.

1830: Liberty on the barricade

Liberty Leading the People by Eugène Delacroix — Eugène Delacroix, *Liberty Leading the People* (1830), Musée du Louvre, Paris

The July Revolution of 27–29 July 1830, the “Three Glorious Days” that removed Charles X, gave Delacroix the subject of his life. He did not fight on the barricades, but he wrote to his brother that if he had not fought for his country, at least he would paint for her. Liberty Leading the People sets an allegorical woman, bare-breasted and carrying the tricolour, among real Parisians: a worker with a sabre, a man in a top hat holding a musket, a street boy with a pistol in each hand, and the dead in the foreground. The mix of allegory and reportage unsettled critics, some of whom found the figure of Liberty vulgar. It was shown at the Salon of 1831, and that same year Delacroix was made a knight of the Légion d’honneur.

What happened next is the story told at the top of this article. Bought by the state, the painting was put away because the new regime feared its message. It was shown again briefly in 1848 and only entered the Louvre’s permanent display in 1874. Since then it has become the image most people picture when they think of the French Republic. Its Liberty became the best-known early image of Marianne, the painting was engraved on the 100-franc note issued from 1978, and in 2008 Coldplay used it as the cover of Viva la Vida or Death and All His Friends.

Between September 2023 and April 2024 the Louvre restored the painting on site. Conservators removed eight layers of yellowed varnish and dirt, recovering bright white clouds and smoke, and found that Liberty’s dress, long seen as yellow, was originally a light grey touched with gold. A few months later, during the opening ceremony of the Paris 2024 Olympic Games, performers recreated the painting as a living tableau at the Conciergerie.

Seven months in Morocco

Convulsionists of Tangier by Eugène Delacroix — Eugène Delacroix, *Convulsionists of Tangier* (1838), Minneapolis Institute of Art

In 1832 Delacroix joined the diplomatic mission that Louis-Philippe sent, under Charles-Edgar, comte de Mornay, to the Sultan of Morocco, Moulay Abd al-Rahman. France had just begun its conquest of Algeria, and Mornay’s job was to reassure the sultan and the British. The mission lasted about seven months and passed through Andalusia and Algiers as well as Tangier and Meknes. Delacroix filled notebook after notebook with drawings and watercolours of people, horses, costumes, courtyards and light. It was the only time he went to North Africa, but it supplied him with subjects for the next thirty years: he eventually produced more than a hundred paintings and drawings based on what he saw.

The best known is Women of Algiers in their Apartment (1834), made after he was allowed into a private house in Algiers, something almost impossible for a European man; he painted a second version in 1849, now in Montpellier. It was followed by The Fanatics of Tangier (1838), Jewish Wedding in Morocco (1839) and The Sultan of Morocco and his Entourage, shown at the Salon of 1845 and now in Toulouse. Scenes of fighting horsemen and lion hunts, which he painted repeatedly into the late 1850s, came from the same source. These pictures made him a central figure of French Orientalism, though his North Africa is less a fantasy harem than a place of dignified, observed people.

Collision of Moorish Horsemen by Eugène Delacroix — Eugène Delacroix, *Collision of Moorish Horsemen* (1843–44), Walters Art Museum, Baltimore

Walls, ceilings and a chapel

From 1833 Delacroix received a steady flow of public commissions, and they occupied much of the rest of his working life. He decorated the Salon du Roi in the Palais Bourbon, seat of the Chamber of Deputies, between 1833 and 1837, then spent roughly a decade on the libraries of both the Palais Bourbon and the Palais du Luxembourg. He painted a large Pietà for the church of Saint-Denis-du-Saint-Sacrement, and between 1848 and 1850 the central ceiling of the Louvre’s Galerie d’Apollon, Apollo Slaying the Serpent Python. His decorations for the Salon de la Paix at the Hôtel de Ville were destroyed when the building burned in 1871.

His last great project was the Chapelle des Saints-Anges in the church of Saint-Sulpice. To be closer to it, he moved in 1857 to an apartment with a garden studio at 6 rue de Furstenberg. There he painted Jacob Wrestling with the Angel, Heliodorus Driven from the Temple and Saint Michael Defeating the Demon, finished in 1861 when he was in poor health. Although he was not a practising believer, he painted hundreds of religious works, and the Saint-Sulpice murals have been called the finest wall paintings of their time.

Chopin, the Journal and a rivalry with Ingres

Outside the Salon, Delacroix was a man of intense friendships. He was close to Frédéric Chopin and George Sand, and in 1838 painted them together in a double portrait. After the painter’s death the canvas was cut in two: Chopin is now in the Louvre and Sand in the Ordrupgaard museum near Copenhagen. Music mattered to him more than almost anything; he wrote in 1855 that nothing could be compared with the emotion it caused.

He was also a writer. His Journal, begun in 1822, dropped in 1824 and resumed in 1847 until his death, is one of the great documents of nineteenth-century art, full of notes on colour, technique, poetry, music and Paris society. It was first published in 1893, and a full critical edition by Michèle Hannoosh appeared in 2009. He was also curious about new media: in 1851 he was a founding member of the Société héliographique, and in 1854 he commissioned the photographer Eugène Durieu to make studies of nude models that he then drew from.

His rival for most of his life was Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, who stood for line, finish and the classical tradition while Delacroix stood for colour, movement and Rubens. The Exposition Universelle of 1855 put them side by side: Ingres showed forty paintings and Delacroix thirty-five, a retrospective of his greatest canvases. Delacroix received the exhibition’s grand medal of honour and was made a commander of the Légion d’honneur, having been promoted to officer in 1846. The Académie des Beaux-Arts, where Ingres opposed him, finally elected him on 10 January 1857, to the seat left by Paul Delaroche, after seven failed candidacies. He also served on the Paris municipal council from 1851 to 1861.

Rider Attacked by a Jaguar by Eugène Delacroix — Eugène Delacroix, *Rider Attacked by a Jaguar* (1855), National Gallery Prague

A will that banned his own face

The winter of 1862–63 was hard on him. He had long suffered from a weak throat, and his illness worsened through the spring. By mid-July his doctor told him nothing more could be done. Delacroix wrote his will, leaving gifts to each of his friends and enough money for his housekeeper of many years, Jenny Le Guillou, to live on. He also added an unusual clause: no image of his features was to be made after his death, whether by death mask, drawing or photograph, and he forbade it “expressly”. He died on the evening of 13 August 1863 in the rue de Furstenberg apartment, aged 65, with Jenny beside him. He is buried in Père-Lachaise cemetery. That year Charles Baudelaire, who had defended him in his Salon reviews since the 1840s, published The Life and Work of Eugène Delacroix.

The painter the moderns claimed

Women of Algiers in their Apartment by Eugène Delacroix — Eugène Delacroix, *Women of Algiers in their Apartment* (1834), Musée du Louvre, Paris

The reputation that the Académie resisted was taken up almost at once by the painters who came after him. In 1864 Henri Fantin-Latour showed Homage to Delacroix, a group portrait of Manet, Whistler, Baudelaire and others gathered around the dead painter’s portrait. Renoir and Manet copied his canvases; Degas bought his portrait of Louis-Auguste Schwiter. Cézanne copied his flowers and his Medea, painted an Apotheosis of Delacroix, and said of Women of Algiers: “We are all in that Delacroix.” Vincent van Gogh made his own version of the Pietà in 1889. Paul Signac wrote a book, From Eugène Delacroix to Neo-Impressionism, tracing the colour theory of his generation back to him. In the 1950s Picasso painted a long series of variations on Women of Algiers.

The rue de Furstenberg apartment and studio where he spent his last years were saved by a group of admirers, including Maurice Denis, and opened as a museum in 1932. Today it is the Musée national Eugène-Delacroix, attached to the Louvre, a short walk from the chapel at Saint-Sulpice. Most of his major canvases are in the Louvre itself, where The Barque of Dante, The Massacres at Chios, The Death of Sardanapalus, Liberty Leading the People and Women of Algiers hang within a few rooms of one another.

For a painter whose work was once hidden in storage and whose Salon entries were dismissed as errors, it is an unusual afterlife. Delacroix wanted no image of himself made once he was dead. France ignored him, printed his portrait on its currency, and made his Liberty the face of the Republic.

Tags: art, artists, painters, Eugène Delacroix, Romanticism, Liberty Leading the People