Delacroix and Shakespeare

Our posting of June 10th makes passing reference to one of the giants of Romanticism in art: Eugene Delacroix. His painting Liberty Leading the People (1830; oil on canvas, now in the Louvre) has long been regarded as an iconic masterpiece that is as relevant in our own time as it was when the Frenchman laid hand to brush in the 19th century.

Delacroix did not wish to submit to the restrictions of classicism. His varied interests extended to both French and English literature, with Shakespeare and Sir Walter Scott among the writers who most appealed to his imagination. Moved by the depth of feeling in Shakespeare, the painter tried to translate that human dimension onto canvas, working and re-working scenes, gasping for a breath of the poet's rarefied air.

Delacroix saw no reason not to paint such non-classical subject matter, and the rebelliousness in his nature ultimately led him to join a relatively small number of other Romantic artists in smashing through the walls of convention and focusing attention on themes and subjects that had previously been all but disregarded.

He seems to have been particularly affected by Shakespeare's Hamlet, painting several different versions of the graveyard scene, of the drowning of Ophelia, and of Hamlet seeing the ghost of his father. Pictured above is his Hamlet and Horatio in the Graveyard (1859; oil on canvas, Louvre). Delacroix had a predilection for the use of strong color in many of his works, and he often chose not to set those colors aside, even while painting a cemetery scene, abundant with allusions to life and death. Such was the palette with which Eugene Delacroix painted the soul of Romanticism.