Eugene Delacroix
Eugène Delacroix was a French painter, lithographer, muralist, and draftsperson associated with the Romanticism movement, born on April 26, 1798, in Saint-Maurice.
Delacroix received his education at the Lycée Pierre-Corneille and subsequently at the Beaux-Arts de Paris, the formal training that preceded his career as a visual artist working across multiple disciplines. In addition to painting, he practiced lithography, pastel, and drawing, and also engaged in photography and mural work, demonstrating a notably broad range of media throughout his working life. He kept a diary, adding the role of diarist to his varied output and leaving a written record alongside his visual production.
Among his notable works are The Massacre at Chios, Liberty Leading the People, Babylonian Captivity, and A Young Tiger Playing with its Mother. These paintings were produced within the Romanticism movement, and his subjects ranged across history painting, landscape, and still life, reflecting the diversity of genres he pursued over the course of his career. He worked in French, and his practice remained rooted in the cultural and institutional context of France throughout his life.
Delacroix died in Paris on August 13, 1863, having sustained a body of work that encompassed history painting, still life, and landscape painting alongside his mural commissions and works on paper.
Quotes by Eugene Delacroix
Eugene Delacroix's insights on:
Men of genius are made not by new ideas, but by an idea which possesses them, namely, that what has been said has not yet been sufficiently said.
The living model never answers well the idea or impressions the painter wishes to express; one must, therefore, learn to do without one, and for that, you must acquire facility, furnish one’s memory to the point of infinitude, and make numerous drawings after the old masters.
I have told myself a hundred times that painting – that is, the material thing called a painting – is no more than a pretext, the bridge between the mind of the painter and the mind of the spectator.
Criticism is like many other things, it drags along after what has already been said and doesn’t get out of its rut.
Cold exactitude is not art... The so-called consciousness of the majority of painters is only perfection applied to the art of boring. People like that, if they could, would work with the same minute attention on the back of their canvas.
A picture is nothing but a bridge between the soul of the artist and that of the spectator.