25 Eugene Delacroix Interesting Fun Facts - French Painter

(Last Updated On: October 6, 2021)

Eugene Delacroix interesting facts are full of fun and learning. Delacroix, Ferdinand Victor Eugène, was a French Romantic painter who was recognized as the school’s head from the start of his career.

In contrast to his major competitor Ingres’ Neoclassical perfectionism, Delacroix drew influence from Rubens and Venetian Renaissance painters, with a focus on color and movement rather than the precision of outline and precisely modeled form, Eugene Delacroix fun facts.

The major topics of his maturation were dramatic and romantic in nature, leading him to travel throughout North Africa in quest of the exotic rather than the traditional models of Greek and Roman art, Eugene Delacroix interesting facts. Delacroix was influenced by Lord Byron, with whom he had a strong affinity with the “forces of the sublime,” with nature infrequently violent action, and was a spiritual successor of Théodore Géricault.

Delacroix, on the other hand, was not given to emotion or bombast, and his Romanticism was that of an individualist. “Delacroix was madly in love with passion, yet coldly resolved to convey emotion as plainly as possible,” Baudelaire wrote, Eugene Delacroix cool facts.

Delacroix, along with Ingres, is regarded as one of the last ancient Masters of painting, and one of the few to have been photographed.

Delacroix’s use of expressive brushstrokes and study of the optical effects of color significantly influenced the work of the Impressionists, while his enthusiasm for the exotic influenced the work of the Symbolists, interesting facts about Eugene Delacroix. Delacroix was a skilled lithographer who illustrated works by William Shakespeare, Walter Scott of Scotland, and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe of Germany.

Talleyrand, who served successively as Restoration and King Louis-ambassador Philippe’s to the United Kingdom, and later as Talleyrand’s grandson, Charles Auguste Louis Joseph, facts about Eugene Delacroix, Duc de Morny, half-brother of Napoleon III and speaker of the French House of Commons, protected him throughout his career as a painter.

In 1815, he began studying Jacques-Louis David’s neoclassical style under Pierre-Narcisse Guérin. A Raphael-like influence may be seen in an early church commission, The Virgin of the Harvest (1819), while another commission, The Virgin of the Sacred Heart (1821), shows a more open interpretation, Eugene Delacroix interesting facts.

Talleyrand, a family friend and the successor of Charles Delacroix as Minister of Foreign Affairs, and whom Eugène resembled in look and temperament as an adult, felt himself to be his true father, Eugene Delacroix cool facts.

Delacroix was credited with 9140 pieces at a sale of his work in 1864, comprising 853 paintings, 1525 pastels and watercolors, 6629 sketches, 109 lithographs, and more than 60 sketchbooks, Eugene Delacroix cool facts.

Delacroix painted several excellent self-portraits as well as a number of memorable portraits that appear to have been done purely for pleasure, including the portrait of fellow artist Baron Schwiter, an inspired small oil of violinist Niccol Paganini, and Portrait of Frédéric Chopin and George Sand, a double portrait of his friends, composer Frédéric Chopin and writer George Sand, interesting facts about Eugene Delacroix.

Eugene Delacroix Interesting facts

1. Delacroix was born at Charenton-Saint-Maurice, Ile-de-France, near Paris, on April 26, 1798.

2. Medical evidence suggests that Eugène’s biological father, Charles-François Delacroix, was unable to reproduce at the time of Eugène’s conception.

3. He was able to sketch some ladies in secret in Algiers, as seen in the picture Women of Algiers in their Apartment (1834), but he had trouble getting Muslim women to pose for him in general due to Muslim laws requiring women to be covered.

4. Delacroix produced several drawings of the people and the city while in Tangier, topics to which he would return till the end of his life.

5. Delacroix began receiving orders to adorn public buildings in Paris in 1833.

6. Eugène was orphaned after his legitimate father, Charles Delacroix, died in 1805 and his mother died in 1814.

7. He went there not to study art, but to get away from the sophistication of Paris and experience a more primal society.

8. Delacroix also created pure landscapes (The Sea at Dieppe, 1852) and still lifes (Still Life with Lobsters, 1826–27), both of which show off his virtuoso figure-based work.

9. Raymond de Verninac Saint-Maur (1762–1822), a diplomat, married Henriette (1780–1827).

10. The Raft of the Medusa had a great influence on Delacroix, who was inspired to create his first major painting, The Barque of Dante, which was approved by the Paris Salon in 1822.

11. Delacroix traveled to Spain and North Africa in 1832 as part of a diplomatic trip to Morocco with the diplomat Charles-Edgar de Mornay, just after the French seized Algeria.

12. On June 14, 1807, he was slain at the Battle of Friedland.

13. He is also recognized for his Journal, in which he expressed his ideas on art and modern life in expressive fashion.

14. His mural painting at St. Sulpice Church has been dubbed the “finest mural painting of his time.”

15. Delacroix took inspiration from a variety of sources throughout his career, including William Shakespeare’s and Lord Byron’s literary works, as well as Michelangelo’s art.

16. Medea ready to Kill Her Children, which Delacroix showed in 1838, caused a stir at the Salon.

17. Over 100 paintings and sketches depicting scenes from or based on the lives of North Africans were finally made by him, adding a fresh and personal chapter to the fascination in Orientalism.

18. “Color always occupies me, but drawing preoccupies me,” he explained, as seen by the number and quality of the drawings, whether done for constructive objectives or to record a spontaneous movement.

19. Yue Minjun, a contemporary Chinese artist, has developed his own take on Delacroix’s work Massacre of Chios, which bears the same title. Yue Minjun’s painting was sold for over $4.1 million at Sotheby’s in 2007.

20. Delacroix was mesmerized by the people and their clothes, and the journey would influence the subject matter of many of his subsequent works.

21. He had his early schooling at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand in Paris and the Lycée Pierre Corneille in Rouen, where he studied classics and earned honors for sketching.

22. Victoire Oeben, the daughter of cabinetmaker Jean-François Oeben, was his mother.

23. He was the youngest of three siblings. In the Napoleonic army, Charles-Henri Delacroix (1779–1845) ascended to the rank of General.

24. It predates the impact of the more vivid and rich style of Peter Paul Rubens, a Flemish Baroque painter, and fellow French artist Théodore Géricault, whose works heralded the beginning of Romanticism in art.

25. Liberty Leading the People is probably Delacroix’s best-known artwork, depicting Parisians taking up weapons and marching ahead under the banner of the tricolor, which stands for liberty, equality, and brotherhood.

25 Eugene Delacroix Interesting Fun Facts – French Painter

Eugene Delacroix Interesting facts

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