Eugène Delacroix

The commanding figure of French Romantic painting and, in the eyes of many who followed, the last great master of the tradition of Rubens and Titian. Delacroix was born probably as the illegitimate son of the diplomat Talleyrand (though this has never been definitively established), trained conventionally in Paris, and made his breakthrough at the Salon of 1822 with The Barque of Dante — a dark, turbulent scene of classical hell borrowed from Dante and Michelangelo that announced a new scale of ambition in French painting. He worked large: ceilings, walls, altarpieces, murals for the Palais Bourbon, the Luxembourg Library and the Louvre itself. His most famous single canvas is Liberty Leading the People (1830), a commemoration of the July Revolution that places an allegorical female figure — bare-breasted, tricolor in hand — at the head of an insurgent crowd. A journey to Morocco and Algeria in 1832, arranged through a diplomatic mission, was the other transforming event of his career: the light, the color, the physical beauty of North African subjects — he filled seven notebooks — gave him material he returned to for the rest of his life and a chromatic intensity he never lost. He never married, lived alone in a series of Paris studios, and kept a journal from 1822 until shortly before his death that is one of the most interesting documents in the history of European art. Delacroix's observations on color theory — particularly his analysis of simultaneous contrast and the way complementary colors vibrate against each other — were read like scripture by Cézanne and the Impressionists, who credited him with the empirical observation of color that their own work extended. He died in 1863, after a long battle with a throat condition, a few months after the Salon rejected Manet's Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe.