Martin Gayford

Wild at heart | 21 January 2016

His frigid self-control concealed an emotional volcano, says Martin Gayford

At the Louvre the other day there was a small crowd permanently gathered in front of Delacroix’s ‘Liberty Leading the People’. They constantly took photographs of the picture itself, and sometimes of themselves standing in front of it. No such attention was given to the other masterpieces of French painting hanging nearby, including many by Delacroix. This painting from 1830 — with its glamorous, bare-breasted personification of liberté, Tricolore in hand, followed by heroic representatives of the working and middle classes — has become an international shorthand for France itself.

Whether or not this is a valid symbol of the country, it is a misleading guide to Delacroix’s own feelings about his native land, its revolutionary traditions and the modern world he watched developing around him in 19th-century Paris. He may have supported liberté, but fraternité and égalité not so much. A truer indication of his opinions is probably to be found in the mural that he painted in a half dome of the library of the Chamber of Deputies at the Palais Bourbon: ‘Attila and his Hordes Overrun Italy and the Arts’.

An exhibition next month at the National Gallery will present Delacroix as the apostle of modernism — and rightly so. He was revered as a predecessor by the impressionists and post-impressionists. A couple of hours before I was strolling through the Louvre last week, I was able to climb the scaffolding in the church of Saint-Sulpice where his wall paintings are currently under restoration. From a foot or two away, Delacroix’s vivid, vibrating colours and bold brush strokes looked startlingly reminiscent of those of Van Gogh or Gauguin.

There is, however, a paradox about the notion of Delacroix as the forerunner to the avant-garde of the 1880s and ’90s. He was a romantic pessimist, inclined to think that civilisation would always decline and barbarism inevitably return.

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