Delacroix and his Forgotten World: The Origins of Romantic Painting 9780755603688, 9781780769370

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Dedicated to Martha Ward

Preface

Let me simply state the central, polemical move in this book. I suggest a new route to the paintings of Delacroix, one that does not start with his Salon début, the Dante and Virgil in Hell (1822), but rather begins with an examination of the 1824 Salon. This context included work by artists who are now obscure—Xavier Sigalon, Léon Cogniet—and it was filled with critical voices of enduring and yet neglected relevance for French painting, such as the novelist Stendhal (Henri Beyle) and Étienne-Jean Delécluze, a former student and later biographer of Jacques-Louis David. This rich, fascinating context is the one in which I understand Delacroix: the kinds of work he did in the 1820s and beyond were shaped by the setting of the 1824 Salon, along with all its participants. The six decades’ worth of Delacroix’s oeuvre still gleams, page after fatiguing page, from many a coffee-table dreadnought. And yet no individual canvas by Delacroix, let alone Sigalon or Cogniet—artists who shaped exactly what contemporary French viewers would think of as their home-grown Romanticism—has consistently received the kind of fascinated revisiting that has sealed the indispensable status of Gustave Courbet’s Studio of the Artist (1855) and of Géricault’s Raft. This book awards complex, previously overlooked paintings an intensity of analysis previously reserved for more canonical productions. My arguments turn on concepts of temporality and drama. After all, how else can we explain the electrifying effect Sigalon’s Locusta had on no less a figure than Stendhal, in contrast to the bafflement elicited by his at the time less successful peer? The Chios is defined by a complete lack of action—this from a painter reflexively associated with the representation of turbulent scenes, all stuffed to the gills with characters from Walter Scott or the Jardin des Plantes. Such perceptions largely result from modernist squeamishness. The defining characteristic of many paintings by Delacroix—such as the simultaneously overwrought and utterly listless figures in the Crusaders Entering Constantinople that captivated Baudelaire—still remains partly beyond the reach of the political contexts, gender roles, or other concerns that have helped articulate Delacroix’s arthistorical reception.

Chapter 1, “Delacroix’s Elusive Paintings,” defines the history of the sometimes overlapping, often baffled versions of Delacroix—from Baudelaire, through the painters Henri Fantin-Latour and Paul Signac, the early twentieth-century art historian Léon Rosenthal, and on to Clement Greenberg. The polemics that have often converged on the painting of JeanAuguste-Dominique Ingres differ from the reverence he received immediately after his death. By contrast, refracting Delacroix through multiple lenses has sustained a reverential image of an august artist with an august oeuvre— with that perception initially frozen into place by posthumous tributes to Delacroix. At the same time, however, Romanticism’s interpretative relevance for nineteenth-century French painting—that great underwriter of the modern museum—has received quite a buffeting. In setting the compass to JacquesLouis David, Thomas Crow, for example, offered an alternative route to French Romanticism, but circumvented a need to mention previous paths to his destination, even though they included densely trod intersections of the literary and artistic. When Jonathan Crary encouraged us to look at unsung achievements by artists from the 1820s and early 1830s, Delacroix’s significance was refreshed by a proleptic form of modernism. Chapter 1 assesses both old narratives and art-historical gingerliness about the character of Delacroix’s painting. I also consider Delacroix’s approach to the tableau—a key aspiration for French painters—by awarding new prominence to the obscure religious painting Christ in the Garden of Olives (1827). Chapter 2, “Isolation in David and Delacroix,” considers a compliment coaxed from Delécluze by just one figure in Delacroix’s Chios. The Chios ostensibly depicts an episodic aftermath of violent events from the Greek War of Independence (1821–7), but its slumped figures and oddly lulled atmosphere do nothing to earn this description; Delécluze was drawn to a part of the painting that concentrated those effects. Delécluze’s writings overall provide vital support for my analysis. For example, I take a look at an intriguing novella he wrote (it hasn’t been looked at before). Delécluze was a seemingly staid force in changing times. Precisely because of his unique background, we can trace across his work a remarkably intense meditation on the links between Delacroix’s work and the heroic subjectivity sought by other artists, including David. What’s more, Delécluze’s opinion of those artists fresh from David’s studio was so withering as to undermine Crow’s claims that a Davidian training continued to be important almost three decades into the nineteenth century. Like-minded art critics shared Delécluze’s general pessimism about the contemporary representatives of the Davidian tradition. Nonetheless, great differences separated reviewers sometimes shunted together as conservative; the intriguing divisions between them are also examined in Chapter 2.

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Delacroix’s brushwork and color are routinely described as defining characteristics of his work, but they haven’t always been pressed into the service of specific arguments about individual paintings. Chapter three, “Paint that Divides and Gathers,” concentrates on two female figures in the Chios. Like other prominent figures in the painting’s foreground, these two women are paired together, but the state of suffering afflicting them puts each beyond the connective reach of her neighbor. The same might be said of all of the couples Delacroix portrayed in the Chios. In fact, the critic Charles-Paul Landon referred to the Chios’s “figures, or rather half-figures because none of them offers a complete development.” Chapter 3 agrees with Landon’s comment. I argue that the irresolution of condition seen in the collapsed female figure near the center of the painting—critics wondered whether she looked alive or dead—was effectively the result of packing brusquely variegated brushwork and color into the smallest of areas. Conclusions reached by this analysis are then extended both to the Chios overall (especially its toying with the motif of the couple) and to the tradition of generalized appreciation for Delacroix’s fluency with paint. Few paintings by Delacroix evoke the unities of depicted gesture and purpose that course though Géricault’s work. Nonetheless, his works are often disadvantageously compared to those by his predecessor, especially the Raft of the Medusa (1819). At the same time, the most acclaimed canvas of the 1824 Salon—not by Delacroix—aspired to a pictorial unity founded on animated drama (albeit bereft of Géricault’s multi-figure emphases). Chapter 4, “The Lost Romantic,” asks why Delacroix’s now-neglected peer Xavier Sigalon achieved an unrepeatable Salon triumph with the trio of figures he portrayed in his painting, the Locusta (this is the short title of Sigalon’s painting). The solution I offer to the mystery of the Locusta’s evanescent success clarifies why Delacroix adopted the directions he did at the beginning of his career— directions resolutely different from those pursued by his then closest rival. When the question of Sigalon’s rise and fall has come up previously in the literature on the period, it has been as a minor matter of ill-starred biography. Yet the Locusta is a painting I consider indispensable for an understanding of French painting in the 1820s and beyond. Chapter 5, “Stendhal’s Art Criticism Reconsidered,” looks at how Stendhal, the Locusta’s greatest champion, described the objects of his enthusiasm or opprobrium, whether he located them on the stage or at the Salon. The overlap between Stendhal’s responses to painting and drama hasn’t received sustained attention, while his “Salon of 1824,” his most ambitious engagement with the art of his times, remains virtually untouched. Stendhal couldn’t bear to throw more than a few exasperated lines in Delacroix’s direction during his “Salon.”

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His critical energies went instead to cataloging the faults he saw both in history paintings by David and in the work of David’s followers. As for praise, the Locusta claimed most of what few compliments Stendhal had to spare for contemporary French painting. Such asymmetric choices provide Chapter 5 with its justification. Stendhal’s art criticism of the 1820s was progressive in tone—or so it has been routinely said—and Stendhal’s disparagement of David conforms to that evaluation: it has been noted more frequently than either Stendhal’s rush past the Chios or his prediction that Sigalon would endure as a “great painter.” These swerves from prescience have been absorbed into general descriptions of the negative response that greeted Delacroix’s early paintings. Chapter 5 shows instead the deep roots underlying Stendhal’s writings on art in the 1820s, his strident opinions included. When Stendhal looked at paintings, he could be dyspeptic or elated. So far, no art historian has listened to this captivating, exasperated voice. Stendhal formulated criteria essential for Delacroix’s development, even though he chose not to follow those criteria directly. The book concludes with an Envoi on how these arguments may bear on our understandings of Romantic painting in the decades after the 1820s, when Delacroix, Ingres, and others continued to develop. I also note with gratitude some interesting currents in scholarship, exemplified by Michèle Hannoosh, Susan Siegfried, Nina Athanassoglou-Kallmyer, Ralph Ubl, Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby, David O’Brien, Marc Gotlieb, and others, and I end with some thoughts on future directions in the historiography of Romanticism.

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Acknowledgments

I thank Michael Fried for suggesting the idea of working on Delacroix, and for his transformative teaching. Martha Ward played a decisive role in this project; I remain in her debt. The best parts of Chapter 2 are due to Marc Gotlieb’s ear for argument and editorial skills. Marc has been an unfailing source of suggestions, support, and, not least, hospitality. Even when the umpteenth request-laden email from me arrived in his in-box, never once did Marc’s signature wit fail him. I’ve also dunned Stephen Bann for his help on more occasions than I care to remember. Stephen always lives up to his reputation for gracious advice and unrivaled insight. David O’Brien has given me immense amounts of help in getting this book off the ground: he gave each chapter the benefit of his most rigorous attention—if I’ve failed to meet his standards, the fault is all mine. Barthélémy Jobert has been extremely generous and helpful throughout, and I’m grateful to him—as well as to the always helpful Joyce Polistena—for the opportunity to publish a small part of Chapter 1 in the Bulletin de la Société des Amis du Musée Eugène Delacroix. I’ve been fortunate enough to benefit from Mark Ledbury’s encouragement too. Wilda Anderson provided vivid praise at a key point. Although she was already reconfiguring the Journal while I was a rank beginner in Delacroix studies, that didn’t stop Michèle Hannoosh from providing ongoing encouragement; the same has been true of the generous Nina Athanassoglou-Kallmyer. Without Jay A. Clarke’s support, this book couldn’t have been written; I’m in Carolyn Gray Anderson’s debt as well. Hollis Clayson’s role may have been peripheral, but it was always inspiring. Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby is always terrific company and ever encouraging. Rachael Ziady Delue has been an indispensable friend throughout. Efthimios Kalos and David Feldman were at the heart of my time in Paris. Richard Shiff, Eik Kahng, Gülru Çakmak, and Marika Knowles continue to provide inspiration and high standards. I’m also grateful to Kevin Chua. Thanks are also due to library staff and curators in a host of institutions in France. Especially illuminating have been my visits to the Musées des Beaux Arts in Le Puy-en-Velay, Orléans, Nantes, Nîmes, Rennes, and Rouen. One of the benefits of a Government of Ireland IRCHSS fellowship was encouragement from Paula Murphy; a mentor at University College Dublin.

Kathleen James-Chakraborty, Professor of the School of Art History and Cultural Policy in UCD, has provided great support, and Paul Duro helped me air research preoccupations on a College Art Association panel. Colleagues and friends from UCD include Carla Briggs, Christine Casey, Philip Cottrell, Nicola Figgis, and Róisín Kennedy. Marc Caball provided a welcome at the Humanities Institute of Ireland. At I.B.Tauris, editors Liza Thompson, Anna Coatman and production editor David Hawkins were exemplary; the design skills of Oliver Smith are on outstanding show throughout this book. Christina Ferando and Kymberly Pinder have been treasured sources of friendship. Finally, I thank Jim Elkins, Anne Fitzgerald, Cíaran McNamee, Kevin MacNamidhe, Maura McNamee, Phyllis McNamee, Eve Moloney, and Eílín Mulcahy. I’m sorry that Donal McNamee didn’t get to see this book in print; I hope that it reflects a bit of his intelligence and love of historical research. Chapter 2 is revised from “Etienne-Jean Delécluze’s Response to Eugène Delacroix’s Scenes from the Massacres at Chios (1824),” The Art Bulletin, March 2007. Chapter 4 is revised from “Sigalon’s Poison,” in The Enduring Instant, Time and the Spectator in the Visual Arts, eds. Antoinette RoeslerFriedenthal and Johannes Nathan (Berlin: Gebrüder Mann Verlag, 2003).

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Chapter 1 Delacroix’s Elusive Paintings

Ferdinand-Victor-Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863) remains one of the most famous nineteenth-century French artists. He is known as a painter of action and movement, who endlessly depicted Romantic scenes of high emotion. Central to Delacroix’s reputation, so it is said, are his gifts for brushwork and color. While the paintings’ subject matter is diverse—an abundance of literary sources, contemporary history, episodes from his 1832 trip to North Africa— narratives or events rich in dramatic activity are their characteristic focus. Bland, generalized, familiar: such an overview would hardly be draped across the careers of Gustave Courbet, Édouard Manet, or indeed Jean-AugusteDominique Ingres, Delacroix’s supposed rival in the nineteenth century. For those not specialized in nineteenth-century French art, Delacroix’s work may have settled into undisturbed contours, having not attracted the same intensity of interest or polemical activity as his equally canonical compatriots. My ploy in beginning with this invented summary is to emphasize the stasis in the perception of Delacroix’s painting, even as scholarly attention to him increases. As a once-reverential fog gradually lifts, the general perception of Delacroix remains, as Beth Wright, editor of a collection of essays on the artist, has remarked, that of an illustrious rather than a well-known figure.1 Delacroix had a nearly six-decade-long career, but that fact has become surprisingly easy to forget. Scholarship on his career’s different phases remains unevenly distributed. I believe that unevenness is more than an ordinary result of growing scholarship; I think it is also symptomatic of several deeply embedded traditions in the reception of Delacroix’s work. In particular I think that a previously unnoticed inability to settle upon a series of works as representative of his painting has characterized some leading traditions of commentary on the artist. Although methodologically diverse, these studies center on the years 1822 to 1834, when Delacroix was first exhibiting at the Paris Salon. Paintings from this period remain generally well known; they include Dante and Virgil in Hell (1822; fig. 2), The Death of Sardanapalus (1827; fig. 3), and Liberty Leading the People (1830; fig. 4). Virtually all of these canvases set large numbers of depicted figures on tilted or uneven grounds;

1 Eugène Delacroix Scenes from the Massacres at Chios: Greek Families Awaiting Death or Slavery, etc., 1824 Oil on canvas 13 ft. 8 in. × 11 ft. 7 in. PAR I S , M U S É E DU L O UV R E

2 Eugène Delacroix Dante and Virgil in Hell, 1824 Oil on canvas 3 ft. 15 in. × 6 ft. 14 in. PARIS, M U SÉE D U LOU VRE

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the remarkable pyramidal arrangement of Théodore Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa (1819; fig. 5) offered Delacroix a compositional template for this. The ready evidence of borrowing, however, means that Delacroix cuts a poor figure in some influential accounts of French nineteenth-century painting—for example, Thomas Crow’s.2 From the opening decade of Delacroix’s career, the Liberty remains perhaps his most famous canvas, and the literature on it forms something of an island unto itself, thanks to the painting’s identification with the July Revolution of 1830. The same isolated intensity attends the Women of Algiers (1834; fig. 6).3 By contrast, much of the period from the mid-1830s to the late 1850s offers a comparatively untraversed prospect. Nonetheless, some of Delacroix’s mural commissions have come in for important scrutiny, with

Michèle Hannoosh considering them in close relation to Delacroix’s writings, including the Journal.4 I believe that a previously unnoticed inability to settle upon a series of works as representative of Delacroix’s painting characterizes some leading traditions of commentary on the artist. Within that context I will examine twentieth-century responses to Delacroix by Michael Fried, Clement Greenberg, and others; from the nineteenth century, I will consider accounts by Charles Baudelaire and the Neo-Impressionist painter and theorist Paul Signac. My aim in this introductory chapter is to revise the now-routine description evoked in my opening paragraph by suggesting the existence of an unexamined interpretative tradition of dispersed responses to Delacroix’s painting. My inquiry will also address the longstanding claim for the priority of depicted action in Delacroix’s painting—one of the commonplaces included in that first paragraph. That priority cannot be read, for example, in either Signac’s or Baudelaire’s responses.

1 For his large canvas painted to honor Delacroix in 1864, Henri Fantin-Latour didn’t choose any exemplary work by which to represent the recently deceased

3 Eugène Delacroix The Death of Sardanapalus, 1827 Oil on canvas 12 ft. 11 1/2 in. × 16 ft. 3 in. PAR I S , M U S É E DU L O UV R E

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4 Eugène Delacroix Liberty Leading the People, 1830 Oil on canvas 8 ft. 6 in. × 10 ft. 7 in. PAR I S , M U S ÉE D U LO UV R E

5 Théodore Géricault Raft of the Medusa, 1819 Oil on canvas 16 ft. 1 in. × 23 ft. 6 PAR IS, MUS ÉE D U LOU VRE

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artist (fig. 7), even though that same year, as Fried has pointed out, there had been an auction sale of Delacroix’s studio and a major exhibition of his work.5 Fantin’s 1864 Homage to Delacroix is a group portrait over which he labored for months. Félix Nadar’s photograph of Delacroix from ten years earlier provided Fantin with his source for the large painted-in portrait of Delacroix,6 which is depicted hanging on a wall behind an imposing array of painters and critics, including Fantin himself (depicted with palette), Alphonse Legros, James McNeill Whistler, Édouard Manet, Baudelaire, and Jules Champfleury. A portrait within a group portrait: Fantin’s emphatic choices have been explained by Fried as resulting from the increasing prestige attributed to the genre of portraiture by Fantin and his peers.7 The role played by Delacroix in Fried’s arguments about the “generation of 1864” allows ample illumination of the pattern of response I am suggesting.8 For Fried, the potential glimpsed in the group portrait in the early 1860s bears witness to the fundamental importance of the tableau for French painters and art critics from the late eighteenth century to at least the end of the nineteenth, a form defined by an exacting unity in which all parts of a painting work together in the service of a remarkable whole.9 Its character changed as the historical context shifted, but in any particular case its achievement brought with it a unity perspicuous to the viewer.

6 Eugène Delacroix Women of Algiers, 1834 Oil on canvas 6 ft. × 7 ft. 7 in. PAR I S , M U S É E DU L O UV R E

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7 Henri Fantin-Latour Homage to Delacroix, 1864 Oil on canvas 5 ft. 3 in. × 8 ft. 1 in. PAR I S , M U S É E D’ O R S AY

Taxed by the demands of configuring a new conception of the tableau, Delacroix earned the respect of Fantin, Manet, Whistler, Legros, and their equally ambitious peers because of his ability to impress upon any one of his canvases the tableau’s proprietary traits. In Fried’s account, the younger painters envied their elder’s matchless capacity, as they sought to intensify the tableau’s characteristic stamp of closure—its brisk, immediately obvious unity.10 But their admiration was attended by an awareness that with Delacroix’s death in 1863, a certain clarity of production had disappeared from French painting. Absent from Fried’s account is mention of any works by Delacroix.11 No examples support his description (the account in this text differs from those offered in other writings, most notably Fried’s analysis of Baudelaire’s “Salon of 1846”).12 Under the terms of the logic supplied in this instance, the experience of looking at one of Delacroix’s paintings yielded, by definition— or more importantly, by anticipation—the certainties of the tableau, and yet examples of representative works do not appear. Not that this is a surprise, according to my argument here: notwithstanding the undoubted strength of Fantin’s investment in the group portrait, no less a painting than the Homage to Delacroix would seem to bear out my point. But Fried’s concern is for a Delacroix who functions as an unerring manufacturer of tableaux, and as a result, the burden of significance that this admiring anticipation needs to carry in his argument weakens Fried’s case for Delacroix’s privileged status within the generation of the 1860s. How can Delacroix be described as an unerring producer of paintings unforgettably singular in their impact, without there being any indispensable examples of paintings unforgettably singular in their impact? Behind Delacroix’s imputed capacity to routinely achieve the proprietary traits of the tableau stretched the long years of his career. Had his career struck any high notes? All his paintings were high notes. This happens to suit Fried’s argument very well, because of the centrality within it of portraiture’s increasing potential, as seen by Fantin and his peers, to incorporate two of the tableau’s most sterling virtues: the ability to yield durational intensity as well as the immediacy of an incontestable pictorial unity. From the retrospective vantage point adopted by Fried, Delacroix’s ability to produce a tableau became logically, instantly, identified with his gifts as a painter. Because the experience of looking at any painting by Delacroix was, by definition, an experience of a tableau, this conception of the tableau also became synonymous with the experience of looking at any painting of Delacroix’s.13

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8 Eugène Delacroix Women of Algiers, detail of the cushion at the left

2 Fried’s use of the perceptions of Delacroix circulating by 1864 can be seen to avail itself of the potential solubility between Delacroix’s character as an artist and the positing of individual, representative works. Thus the absence of any mention of works by Delacroix in Fried’s argument allows identification of further continuities in response to his painting. Consider, for example, Delacroix’s facility with paint, another of the commonplaces mentioned in my opening: isolated patches of paint and even individualized brushstrokes have been pressed into service to evoke his gifts as a painter across the span of his career. For Signac, in particular, the individuality of Delacroix’s brushstrokes held great interest. From Eugène Delacroix to Neoimpressionism (1898), Signac’s celebrated polemical text, claims Delacroix’s brushstrokes as a prototype, a “lofty authority” for the Neo-Impressionist approach to paint and color.14 To put it in condensed form, Delacroix’s work, according to Signac, presaged the optical mixing of color that Neo-Impressionism had brought to perfection. But why did Signac light upon Delacroix’s painting in particular? And how could he find Delacroix’s vast oeuvre so amenable to the requirements of his pamphlet’s resolutely specific agenda? Under the terms of Neo-Impressionism at its most elite and theoretical (i.e., this text by an artist who had become Neo-Impressionism’s leading representative), the painter was allowed one essential gesture, in which the

9 Eugène Delacroix Shipwreck of Don Juan, c. 1840 Oil on canvas 4 ft. 5 in. × 6 ft. 5 in. PARIS, M U SÉE D U LOU VRE

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hand was drilled to tip brush against canvas, over and over again.15 It stands to reason that inaugural validation for Neo-Impressionism’s tiny deposits of oil paint would be best served by a predecessor whose paintings would prove amenable to quotation on a micro level. Even more noteworthy than Signac’s verve in claiming ancestral instances for Neo-Impressionism in Delacroix’s staccato applications of “hatchings” is the ease with which Signac accomplished just that.16 One of Signac’s examples is the “blue-green lining” imparting “sheen and brilliance” to the “orangey-pink” blouse of the “reclining woman [depicted] at the left” of the Algiers (see fig. 8).17 Signac excerpted even smaller areas of paint from Delacroix’s Shipwreck of Don Juan (1841). According to Signac, isolated curls of “funereal white,” applied to evoke the choppy waters depicted in this painting’s foreground, sprinkled a “sinister glitter” “amidst all [the] gloom” of “glaucous green” and “mournful blacks” (figs. 9, 10).18 Even if we accept the contention that a zeal for brushstrokes collected into veritable parcels of paint was a descriptive strategy that perhaps only Signac could pursue, his response to Delacroix’s work remained evidently dependent on the piecemeal, the partial. He also meandered across the chronology of Delacroix’s development: his invocation of the Don Juan occurs just shortly

10 Eugène Delacroix Shipwreck of Don Juan, detail of water in the foreground

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11 Eugène Delacroix Entry of the Crusaders into Constantinople, detail of slumped-over figure in right foreground, 1840 12 Eugène Delacroix Chios, detail of old woman’s figure

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after his description of patches from the Algiers, painted six years earlier. Writing about Delacroix’s painting 50 years before Signac, Baudelaire also proved himself capable of joining different figures from different paintings produced decades apart within the same sentence. At one point in his “Salon of 1846” he proceeds back in time from a figure painted in 1840 to one painted 16 years earlier. The Crusaders Entering Constantinople (1840) gave him the figure of a “kneeling woman, with her hair cast down, in the foreground,” which he instantly followed by the invocation of the “old woman, so wrinkled and forlorn” depicted in the foreground of the Scenes from the Massacres of Chios of 1824 (figs. 11, 12).19 ( I will shortly return to these two choices.)

3 These peculiarities of judgment in Signac and Baudelaire are symptomatic. If the tendency that I’m suggesting exists (i.e., to assess Delacroix’s painting overall in dispersed, synchronic ways), why hasn’t it been previously taken as a critical problem? The reason, I think, bears on the now-stranded sense of the term French Romanticism in relation to Delacroix. The tendency to concentrate on Delacroix’s work of the 1820s and early 1830s as representative of his career is well established; it has also masked the continuities in response that I am tracing here. As the twentieth century wore on, it became increasingly automatic to designate Delacroix’s representative painting as that of the first 20 years or so of his career. The presumptions behind this were largely generated, as Stephen Bann has discussed, by Léon Rosenthal’s categorizations in his book, Romantic Painting (1914). Bann has described how Delacroix was only the most prominent of several painters who inconveniently outlived the time frame for Romanticism in French painting originally allotted by Rosenthal.20 Although the specificity of Rosenthal as a source was eroded in later twentiethcentury scholarship, the decade of the 1820s and just beyond (from Dante and Virgil to the Algiers) came to define Delacroix’s work in general.21 More recently, Romanticism’s interpretative relevance has evaporated from some evaluations of Delacroix’s painting—a realignment that has produced some curious assessments. From the very first year of the nineteenth century, for example, comes an arresting oil sketch (The Battle of Nazareth [1801]) by Jean-Antoine Gros, the Napoleonic painter (fig. 13). It has been seen as an evocation of violence and exoticism via atmospheric color, a flurry of brushwork, and an asymmetric, decentralized composition. Why not propose Gros’s sketch as an inaugural instance of Romanticism? In making this eminently reasonable suggestion, with its cluster of characteristics at once scrupulously incontestable and general, Thomas Crow foregrounds one of Jacques-Louis David’s most fascinating students, affirms the reach of David’s artistic authority, and demotes Romanticism’s regulatory importance for French painting of the first third of the nineteenth century, bypassing a need to mention previous routes to Romanticism in French painting (through densely trod intersections of literary and artistic movements).22 By contrast, in Techniques of the Observer, Jonathan Crary attributes a neglected radicalism to the 1820s and early 1830s. Crary mentions Delacroix’s inaugural decades in relation to the importance of changes in the physiology of vision during this period. He encourages us to look at unsung achievements from these years, produced by an array of artists including Delacroix.23 Study of their work, Crary notes, has remained within the confines of specialized

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art-historical studies. Moreover, the paradigm-shattering status these artists are entitled to has been awarded instead to predominantly French paintings from the latter part of the nineteenth century.24 While Crary emphasizes that art historians have done this awarding, he doesn’t go into the various collections of historical reasons supporting their judgments—and this testifies to their redoubtable familiarity. These reasons, found congregating in the early years of the 1860s, range from the coincident identifications pooled in Baudelaire, Walter Benjamin, and Guy Debord—of alienation, anonymity, specularity, and so on—through to Fried’s critique of Greenberg’s arguments for a contraction of painterly means.25 If such familiarity has crowded out an earlier “dissonance” and strangeness Crary describes as inherent to the work of Delacroix and various of his contemporaries, this “dissonance” and strangeness should emerge once the contribution of these overlooked artists to a massive expansion of the visual realm is recognized. This doesn’t happen in Crary’s account, and as a result, their radicalism amounts to a proleptic form of modernism. Unfortunately for his argument, even a slanted invocation of the early 1860s involves too mammoth a historical site for modernist significance. The consequence of arguing that this site is not entitled to all the significance it has accrued, while gesturing to the under-valued 1820s and 1830s, is a default transferral of those well-known collections of modernist value to the painting from earlier decades. The mechanism of Crary’s claim for Delacroix and his contemporaries is logically one of relocation. A familiar clock, one set to the 1860s, remains in use, although set further back in time. In the case of Greenberg, this definition led to a misalignment in his response to Delacroix’s painting. Greenberg’s best-known reaction to Delacroix is probably aversion. Literariness consigned Delacroix’s painting to the role of way station en route to Manet. That is not my concern here; I emphasize instead that Greenberg’s ranking of Delacroix is based on qualities selected from particular paintings. Here again, we find a diffused and non-sequential evaluation yielding an artist unassimilable to an array of singularly representative works. According to Greenberg, Delacroix’s painting was defined by the Romanticism of the period “from about 1820 into the mid-1830’s.”26 But the passages he lit upon as evidence of Delacroix’s greatest achievements, and his role as “one of the great turning-points in the history of Western painting,” are found in paintings from the late 1840s or later, including the relatively obscure Diana and Actaeon (1862), painted a year before Delacroix’s death (fig. 14).27 The quality of such details removed Delacroix from the comfort zone of the literary, to which his work was prey.

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13 Antoine-Jean Gros Battle of Nazareth, 1801 Oil on canvas 2 ft. 7 in. × 3 ft. 4 in. MUSÉE D ES BEAU X–ARTS, NANTES

Greenberg’s response remained at odds with its own imposition of order. He took Delacroix’s work to signify as a whole. In fact, Delacroix was one of the last artists to have enjoyed more than “twenty years” of “absolute realization” in his painting.28 Nonetheless, Greenberg awarded defining importance to Delacroix’s canvases “from about 1820 into the mid-1830s.” In other words, the value accorded passages from Delacroix’s late work did not draw its interpretative strength from the formative role Greenberg had given to the earlier period. Baudelaire had also taken Delacroix’s work to signify as a whole, but his response had remained unmarked by a contradiction arising from the privileging of one period. In the “Salon of 1846,” Baudelaire listed the following “succession” of works: “Dante and Virgil, The Massacre at Chios, Sardanapalus, Christ in the Garden of Olives, St. Sebastian, Medea, The Shipwreck of Don Juan, the Hamlet, the Crusaders [Entering] Constantinople, and the Women of Algiers” (figs. 15, 16). Because it didn’t occur to Baudelaire to stop listing works made after “the mid-1830s,” his “succession” included paintings which have subsequently slipped below the horizon of art-historical interest (for example, the Constantinople and the Hamlet).29 But Baudelaire’s “succession,” I would argue, doesn’t function as a selection of Delacroix’s representative paintings. In fact Baudelaire couldn’t have made such a list—because of the extent to which he responded to the evocative power of certain works by Delacroix, and to parts of works, it would have proved unmanageably large. Musing on any potentially representative individual figure in a painting was also liable to prompt thoughts of other

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figures, including some not by Delacroix. Baudelaire’s response to Delacroix makes sense only within the context of the best-known discussion of that response, Fried’s account of the “memory structure” of Western painting and sculpture in Baudelaire’s “Salon of 1846.” Here I want to integrate this concept within the commonality of features I’ve been tracing.

14 Eugène Delacroix Diana and Actaeon, 1856–63 Oil on canvas 6 ft. 4 in. × 5 ft. 3 in. M U S EU D E A RT E DE S Ã O PA UL O

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15 Baudelaire’s choices from top left: Dante and Virgil, The Massacre at Chios, Sardanapalus, Christ in the Garden of Olives (1827; Paris, Église Saint-Paul et Saint-Louis), and St. Sebastian (1836; Nantua, Église Saint-Michel)

16 Baudelaire’s choices (continued) from top left: Medea (1838; Lille, Palais des Beaux-Arts), Hamlet and Horatio (1839; Louvre), The Shipwreck of Don Juan, Crusaders Entering Constantinople, and Women of Algiers

4 By “memory structure,” Fried means the centuries-old recourse made by artists to Classical, Renaissance, and post-Renaissance traditions as constantly mined sources of reusable expressions, poses, and compositions. Although Fried’s analysis of Baudelaire’s response to Delacroix is not the main point of his essay, the “Salon of 1846” provided Fried with his leading example of the operation of the “memory structure”: Baudelaire had taken elaborate pains, both justificatory and convoluted, to assure himself that his favorite artist’s achievement was reinforced from afar and mercifully precedent free— exactly because Delacroix’s multi-figure paintings were riddled with poses, expressions, and anatomical templates taken from the old masters. In Fried’s reading, Baudelaire wanted these traditions kept at bay—at a reinforcing, evocative remove from an individual painting.30 This aspect of the essay has been widely appreciated.31 Less readily invoked is the ferociously unstable, endlessly ramifying nature of Baudelaire’s original perception of an individual painting in any particular case. The potential baselessness Fried describes led to the difficulties that plagued Baudelaire when he attempted to create an interpretative equilibrium for Delacroix’s paintings.32 The depth of the “memory structure” is the reason why, once it is considered alongside other bodies of evidence, Baudelaire’s excerpting, during his “Salon of 1846,” of two figures, one from the Crusaders Entering Constantinople and the other from the Scenes at the Massacres at Chios, offers the potential to reconcile the two apparently different versions of Delacroix. On the one hand there is the diffuse, non-locatable artist, who nevertheless has a reputation for completion; on the other there is a painter whose greatest effects lingered in parts, pieces, or isolated figures. According to Baudelaire, “[i]n several [paintings by Delacroix] by some strange and recurring accident, you will find one figure which is more stricken, more crushed than the others; a figure in which all the surrounding anguish is epitomized.”33 For Baudelaire, such a figure conveyed a despondency so deeply etched as to concentrate the generalized suffering of his or her companions. Baudelaire’s first example was the bowed-over female figure depicted seated in the foreground of the Crusaders Entering Constantinople; his second was the “old woman, so wrinkled and forlorn” seen in the foreground of Delacroix’s Chios, and who is also portrayed as seated (figs. 11, 12).34 If the softly painted forms of the first (but chronologically later) figure, with her slumped back and shadowed, brushed-in profile, generally conform to a conventional evocation of passivity, most other commentators on the old woman saw neither the wrinkled face nor the “crushed” dejection

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Baudelaire ascribed to the figure from 1824. In the same year, Alphonse Rabbe described the old woman’s sharply drawn face as “fleshless,” while Adolphe Thiers, whose prescient admiration for the young Delacroix was extolled by Baudelaire, identified a startled “old woman who looked terrified.”35 More intriguing still is the response to this figure of the old woman by Léon Cogniet, a now-obscure artist who was Delacroix’s contemporary. (His later career has been re-examined by Marc Gotlieb.36) Although he concentrated on the exact same figure later isolated by Baudelaire, Cogniet waxed enthusiastic about the obvious way in which the “old woman” improved on the art of the past. Cogniet’s remarks (made during a visit to Delacroix’s studio to see the Chios) were recorded by Delacroix in the Journal. Cogniet said that “he felt as though he were seeing the beginnings of a picture [i.e., the Chios] of the great period.37 And then he said how much Géricault would have liked it! The old woman without a gaping mouth, whose eyes aren’t exaggerated.”38 By excerpting not a focal figure but one depicted just off-center, Cogniet included himself in the tradition of appreciative viewers lighting upon secondary parts of Delacroix’s paintings. His general invocation of the recently deceased Géricault, in whose shadow Cogniet also emerged as a painter, is unsurprising as well. A look at the middle ground of Géricault’s Raft reveals faces tilted in ways also seen in the figure of the old woman Delacroix had painted in the Chios (see fig. 5). Here, Delacroix’s recourse to Géricault’s composition seems to accrue further, localized debts. In addition, a number of otherwise diverse canvases from the years 1820 to 1824 show Delacroix’s fascination with the potential of this very pose, with a series of faces caught at an alerted, upturned angle.39 Not surprisingly, then, Hal Foster, in his discussion of Fried’s concept of the “memory structure,” has argued that Baudelaire drew on “the persistence of [Géricault’s Raft] in Delacroix’s work of the 1820s” as a “kind of subtextuality of mnemonic afterimages.”40 This persistence, also found in Crow’s assessments of Delacroix, leads from works such as the Chios or Dante and Virgil straight back to the Raft.41 A familiar marker signals the trail’s end: the extent of Delacroix’s dependence on Géricault. But this only deepens the need to explain the terms of Baudelaire’s memory of the old woman in the Chios. In this instance, the trail leads from faces marked by an active expressivity, quintessentially Géricauldian in its imagining, to the figure resolutely described by Baudelaire as “crushed.” I believe that Cogniet’s response to the old woman in the Chios can explain this apparent anomaly. Cogniet greeted this figure with cheery approval: he even expressed relief. Why was this the case? His words indicate that his relief stemmed from Delacroix’s omission of “a gaping mouth” from the old woman he portrayed in the Chios. In other words, Cogniet immediately spotted a

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17 Guido Reni Massacre of the Innocents, detail of open-mouthed mother in upper left

18 Nicolas Poussin Massacre of the Innocents, detail of open-mouthed mother in foreground

19 Nicolas Poussin Massacre of the Innocents, 1626 Oil on canvas 4 ft. 11 in. × 5 ft. 7 in. M U S ÉE CO N D É, CH AN T I L LY

change made by Delacroix to a source. He wasted no time in conveying his enthusiasm about Delacroix’s variation on a theme; a delighted shorthand record quickly made its way into the Journal. In fact, the whole exchange between these fellow artists about the figure of the old woman may have been over in minutes. Over the course of a visit to another painter preparing for the Salon, Cogniet showed how much the role precedent played in the figure of the old woman, unacceptable to Baudelaire, was part and parcel of studio practice. Géricault’s is the only name mentioned in the Journal’s entry about Cogniet’s compliment, and this accords perfectly with how pervasive the Raft is in the work of Delacroix’s first decade as an exhibiting artist. But it is vital to note how Cogniet glimpsed a longer lineage in the Chios’s old woman: one that included the seventeenth-century artists Guido Reni and Nicolas Poussin. Foster’s “memory structure” thus departs somewhat from Fried’s analysis of the “Salon of 1846.” Baudelaire rested secure in Delacroix’s invocation of the art of the past, because he believed it to be heedless: the force of the involuntary allowed Delacroix his access to tradition—and Géricault was only a recent representative of many traditions. To be sure, the Raft might offer itself as an initial “afterimage” in the major paintings of Delacroix’s early career, but it has plenty of company. Distraught mothers in full cry are depicted in the famous versions of the Massacre of the Innocents by Reni and Poussin (figs. 17, 18) (Poussin’s canvas was painted 15 or 16 years after Reni’s [figs. 19, 20]). Delacroix withheld the motif of “O”-shaped lips parted in the evocation of sound. And here we find the reason for Cogniet’s delighted relief: Delacroix had spared him a frozen moment of endless wailing. Cogniet, I believe, made his admiration for the expressive effect of a closed mouth evident in his own painting. Nonetheless, he followed a direction entirely contrary to the one he had seen Delacroix take. At the time he visited Delacroix’s studio, Cogniet was working on his own version of the Massacre of the Innocents (fig. 21). Frozen with fear, the fleeing mother he depicted at its center has dropped to her feet to snatch an opportunity of temporary refuge from Herod’s soldiers.42 Cogniet gave her exactly the same seated pose he had seen Delacroix use for the figure of the old woman—down to the outwardturning soles of her crisscrossed feet (although her knees are angled in the opposite direction). The young mother is shown clasping a hand across her terrified child’s mouth, her fingers displacing his lips. In the case of Cogniet’s favorite figure from the Chios, a closed mouth had sealed the heightened sense of inner drama her expression conveyed. In 1846, Baudelaire could allow this dramatic face—tilted, tensed, angular—to float into the same affective space as a dejected, inward-turning, and slumped figure from a later painting. In

20 Guido Reni Massacre of the Innocents, 1611 Oil on canvas 8 ft. 10 in. × 5 ft. 7 in. P I N ACO TE C A N A Z I O N A L E , B O L O GN A

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1824, however, an ambitious young painter pursued the potential he saw in a contemporary’s Salon-destined canvas, but in terms of one already familiar register. Cogniet took a lesson in pictorial drama from the old woman’s expression, demonstrating the efficacy of a cry depicted as checked instead of heard. This allowed Cogniet to turn Delacroix’s variation on the fatiguing theme to account—but in a way that allied his painting directly to the Raft, in which many figures converge on a hopeful horizon.43 Cogniet made a closed mouth the focus of two tensed figures. They weren’t trapped in a moment of endless crisis: they were frozen into stifled silence. To be sure, other depictions of the Massacre of the Innocents hone in on a mother–child duo, But Cogniet’s remarkable concentration on a motif of maternal fingers directly overlaying— and thereby stifling—infant lips is unparalleled. In effect, Cogniet’s own Salon entry has a single-figure focus within a narrative defined by population. The sheer ungainliness of scale seen in Cogniet’s painting has to be accounted for by something of this order. A virtually colorless scene is inserted into the composition it also commands—essentially, a large box of chiaroscuro, leaving the dramatically dumbstruck figures of mother and child in a kind of pictorial quarantine, squeezing out the strips of outdoor brightness seen to the canvas’s left and top.44 Cogniet’s decision indicates the extent to which the Raft’s composition provided artists painting in the years following its first exhibition with an inescapable and burdensome template for multi-figure painting.

5 Of course, when describing the same figure to which Cogniet had been drawn, Baudelaire didn’t mention the Raft, not recognizing Delacroix’s premeditated invocation of any artist, Géricault included. In addition, however, the sense of “anguish” to which Baudelaire was drawn in the Constantinople and the Chios depends upon a strung-out, protracted sense of duration.45 These are temporal conditions far removed from the pleading action portrayed in the Raft, where an unparalleled degree of exertion lends the depicted moment its tension. The straining figures in the Raft’s middle ground, their faces upturned in remarkable unison, lend perpetual, intertwined support for the composition’s heroic apex (fig. 22). This fact supports my identification of a particular interpretative tradition that has grown up around Delacroix’s painting: not one part of the Raft can be excerpted in the ways we have seen different canvases by Delacroix constantly offer themselves to a wide range of viewers. Delacroix’s conception of multi-figure painting, unmotivated by the strength of unified purpose that courses through the many individuals depicted in the Raft, included the recognition that markers of instantaneity

21 Léon Cogniet Massacre of the Innocents, 1824 Oil on canvas 8 ft. 10 in × 7 ft. 10 in. M U S ÉE D ES B E A UX - A RT S , R E N N E S .

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22 Théodore Géricault Raft, detail of figure group’s pinnacle

were not viable—because not persuasive—outside of a particular depicted moment. The Raft’s evocation of sound is one of those markers (see fig. 5). Nothing could be more credible than the attribution of desperate shouts to the tilted faces seen in the Raft’s middle ground. Some of them are portrayed with slightly parted lips, a feature that Delacroix completely eliminated from a series of portrayals, all resolutely similar to each other, in which every face is alerted, angular, and upturned: the clean-shaven disciple seen in the lower right-hand foreground of Virgin of the Sacred Heart (1820; fig. 23); the girl’s head that dominates Young Girl in a Cemetery (1824; fig. 24); and finally, the Portrait of an Old Woman (1824; fig. 25). Delacroix achieved the emphatic line marking the old woman’s mouth in the Chios (fig. 26) via an expression that he gradually sharpened through a series of similar faces. But how was this

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transformation credibly effected? Such angularity emerged because it is the evocation of age, which differentiates the various upturned faces.46 And this transformation—from the young faces in the Virgin of the Sacred Heart and Girl in a Cemetery, to gaunter expressions seen in Portrait of an Old Woman and then in the Chios—indicates, I believe, the distance Delacroix attempted to open on a pose whose signature appearance was in the Raft. Having found its expressivity impossible to relinquish, Delacroix was compelled instead to shed its proprietary instantaneity. His eventual decision to portray an older face caught in this pose’s signature tilt must be seen, I suggest, in light of this attempt. If we look again at the face of the old woman that Cogniet applauded, we can note that her forehead and cheeks are tautened and her lips appear closed, all of these features also betraying evidence of constriction. It is because the old woman’s face appears so drawn and thin-lipped—“fleshless,” according to Rabbe—that her mouth appears closed in the virtually straight line to which Cogniet was drawn. Cogniet proved that he would willingly shift the entirety of one of Delacroix’s paintings aside in favor of the compelling interest of a particular element—and with that he ensured his response would join a later tradition of interpretation. In his own painting, however, Cogniet abandoned the resolute secondariness of figural focus that he had found compelling in Delacroix’s. The question this raises is whether the unexpected recalibration of interest glimpsed by Cogniet, given that he was looking at one early, albeit major canvas, eventually came to constitute in Delacroix’s painting a sufficiency in and of itself. Raising the question of this degree of sufficiency allows us to pose an important question: might such a recalibration of interest be enough as to provide the conditions for a tableau by Delacroix? In 1827, the prominent critic Louis Vitet welcomed Delacroix’s Christ in the Garden of Olives (fig. 27) to that year’s Salon by saying it was evidence that “finally, M. Delacroix has painted his tableau.”47 Although the canvas is now rather darkened, it is still possible to readily see the oppositional composition Vitet praised; one that divides three angels from the figure of Christ. Flagged by a white sleeve, Christ’s left

23 Eugène Delacroix Virgin of the Sacred Heart, 1821 Oil on canvas 8 ft. 5 in. × 5 ft. AJACCI O C AT H E DR A L , C O R S I C A

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24 Eugène Delacroix Young Girl in a Cemetery, 1824 Oil on canvas 26 in. × 21 in.

25 Eugène Delacroix Portrait of an Old Woman, 1823 Oil on canvas 1 ft. 5 in. × 1 ft. 2 in.

PAR IS, MUSÉ E DU L OU VRE

M U SÉE D ES BEAU X- ARTS , O R LÉAN S .

arm is stretched out against the row of angels borne aloft on a spreading cloud that occupies the left-hand side of the canvas. Only one of the three angels looks down on Christ; the figure nearest the viewer bows her head and buries her face in her hands. It was the degree to which serene figures seemed to have been plunged into strong emotion that prompted Vitet’s particular admiration. “The sorrowful and tender expression of these three angels” seemed to Vitet “an enchanting idea,” one that was “entirely new.” He was glad to see that “[t]here is true inspiration [Delacroix’s painting],” based on his ability “to rejuvenate a subject that has been so endlessly repeated.”48 Other critics shared Vitet’s opinion about the unexpected migration of depicted emotion. “Instead of strengthening him,” Charles Farcy pointed out, “[the angels] also show the profound depth of [Christ’s] suffering.”49 In addition, Auguste Jal proclaimed, “What sorrow there is in these messengers of consolation!” Jal mused that the angels looked “as though they would like to be able to rescue this unfortunate innocent: they came to make a victim of him [but now] they want to soothe the heart of bitterness.”50 Depicted suffering that welled up with surprising strength in lesser figures: wasn’t that the reason why Baudelaire selected two figures from Delacroix’s painting in his “Salon of 1846”? Two factors obstruct a ready parallel. First, the “messengers of consolation” that drew Vitet’s interest appear patently agitated rather than barely animated. The small figural group of the Olives is structured by the kind of dramatic contrasts that received their canonical expression in David’s history paintings of the 1780s.51 Vitet’s praise made evident the fact that for him, at least, these were still unfaded merits; his criteria were informed by an ideal of unified action that the Raft had been the last to secure. Second, Vitet acclaimed a canvas that he believed at the time was Delacroix’s main contribution to the “Salon of 1827”; he was content that the Olives would reverse the critical fortunes of a mercurial young painter. But Vitet hadn’t yet seen the Death of Sardanapalus; its late arrival at the 1827 exhibition erased the punctual Olives’ popularity.52 In 1846, Baudelaire was writing from a much longer view; Delacroix’s career was by then almost three decades long. But a disheveled chronology of that career came easily to Baudelaire, as it would to Signac and Greenberg. Neither did it occur to Baudelaire—in a pattern that I have claimed would become familiar—to represent that career by key works or divide it up according to distinct phases. These obstructions, and others besides, at least partly resolve themselves once the following, apparently minor question is addressed. Given that the age of the woman depicted in the Chios is suggested by the tautness of skin and linearity of feature upon which Cogniet dwelt, why did Baudelaire describe

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her in the way he did? (The “old woman [appears] so wrinkled and forlorn” [see fig. 26].) The reason Baudelaire didn’t describe the same aspects noted by Cogniet was that the loosened handling Delacroix had adopted as his routine approach to women’s faces by the time he painted the Constantinople couldn’t accommodate the articulation of aging. Even though Delacroix’s Chios has become one of his best-known canvases, it doesn’t include areas of paint that became representative of Delacroix’s painting, at least for Baudelaire. In fact, critics in 1824 saw a particular kind of application that may have reached its peak in that very year—paint sharply applied, perfectly tailored to a tensed and “fleshless” face in the foreground. This inserted portraiture, as it were, specifically pursued within a history painting, had receded from familiarity

26 Eugène Delacroix Chios, detail showing face of old woman in right foreground

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by 1846, and Delacroix had abandoned the particularization of skin and musculature upon which it depended. Baudelaire’s backwards chronology demonstrates this: the more characteristic figure—to him—was the one he mentioned first. Examples are legion of the kind of softened oval (olive-shaped eyes, slightly blurred features) to which Delacroix increasingly assimilated renditions of women’s faces. The three seated, frontally posed female figures seen in the Algiers share a version of this oval (see fig. 6). Such a face also appears, set at a horizontal angle, in the somnolent, closed-eye expression of the collapsed female figure depicted lying across the lap of the “kneeling” figure from the Constantinople (see fig. 11). The facial features of the latter can hardly be discerned: they melt into shadows cast by the sweep of hair that falls in front of her face. If this was a preference on Baudelaire’s part—figures blurred or melting, utterly lacking in detail—we need to explain why he immediately reached for the indication of age provided by skin, singling out a face from the Chios: an “old woman” who appears “so wrinkled.” Baudelaire made recourse to descriptive traits based on an assumption of skin’s faithfulness to character— and this assumption, I suggest, was informed by his reading of Stendhal. When the early date of his second choice of figure, the old woman, put him at a disadvantage, Baudelaire chose alternative indicators of age. And for Stendhal, forms of imprint and trace, most saliently those carried by the skin, satisfied his concern to see as perfect a fit as he deemed possible between cause and effect. In Chapter 5, I will have more to say about Stendhal’s interest in such forms of evidence, but for now I note that these concerns permeate those chapters from the History of Painting in Italy quoted by Baudelaire in the “Salon of 1846”—and in one of the Salon’s most important sections: “The Ideal and the Model.” Baudelaire marveled at the intricacy and connectivity of individual causality (“such a hand demands such a foot”) in this section with an exactly Stendhalian awareness.53 In the same part of the History with which Baudelaire was especially familiar, Stendhal praised the “fresh complexion” of a “young man from the provinces” in the “best of health” who had “recently arrived in Paris.”54 The young man’s hale appearance cheered Stendhal; it confirmed his character, or rather the character Stendhal attributed to him—devoid of the guile in which Parisians were steeped (Stendhal was a fellow provincial).55 But the face of the woman Baudelaire described in the Constantinople is not only shadowed and softly painted, it is bowed down, turned in, shielded— variously masked. Delacroix’s preference for evoking female faces with features blurred into generalized form involves an inexorable obliteration of the individualized face. The notion that address within a multi-figure painting— and multi-figure compositions remained a constant within his oeuvre—is

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carried pre-eminently by the individualized face seemed to hold decreasing interest for Delacroix. This accounts for the ease with which a tradition of viewers have been able to light upon dispersed, subsidiary elements within his paintings, including the selection by Signac and later Greenberg of peripheral passages of paint (for example, Signac’s corner of the Algiers in which a cushion is depicted; Greenberg’s selection of a dog portrayed in the foreground of the Diana and Actaeon [see figs. 8, 14]). As this point, then, we can conclude with a particular degree of assurance that close looking reveals that the paintings of an artist associated with tempestuous subjects are marked by an increasing reluctance to paint individuated features—a reluctance so strongly marked that it must have stemmed from the potential of generalizing, melted forms to convey a strong subsidence of drama and action. The degree to which Baudelaire responded to such a subsidence—even attributing, as he did, a “crushed” expression to a face patently alert and upturned—indicates that such quelled qualities satisfied his demand that blameless originality constitute the very character of Delacroix’s painting. There is intriguing evidence for this claim. It comes from a dismissal of Cogniet’s Massacre of the Innocents due to its reliance on the art of the past: for one viewer at the Paris Salon in 1824, what seemed like an overt debt overpowered any possibility of praise. The judgment was Stendhal’s: he said that Cogniet couldn’t prevent his revamped figure from looking like “a pastiche of the Carracci, or if, you like, the portrait of a first-rate actress impersonating a mother in despair.”56 Here, what Fried would call the theatricality of the Massacre of the Innocents was identified by Stendhal. But Stendhal’s recognition of precedent—in what he deemed a pale shadow of the Bolognese lineage entwined in the traditions Cogniet had tried to emulate— was what prompted Stendhal’s exasperation with a contemporary version of the Massacre of the Innocents.57 His criticism cut to the quick of Cogniet’s attempt to evict an active, spotlit, wailing mother—an emblematic inheritance from “the great period”—and replace her with a silenced, staring, and more successfully dramatic one, a central figure draped in chiaroscuro so emphatic that Géricault himself “might have liked it.” And by lambasting Cogniet’s mother as one doomed to “despair,” Stendhal revealed how he hadn’t even reached as far as the hope Cogniet actively inscribed in this figure—her clasping fingers show how she clings to the promise invisibility gives her. Unfortunately for Stendhal, and even more unfortunately for the ambitious Cogniet, the citational role that precedent played in a nineteenth-century Massacre of the Innocents was brought to light in the first place by an attempt to paint a canvas wholly dependent on one dramatic moment.

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27 Eugène Delacroix Christ in the Garden of Olives Oil on canvas 11 ft. × 14 ft. 6 in.

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Chapter 2 Isolation in David and Delacroix

So far we’ve looked at a tradition of interpretation in which appreciative commentators were drawn by unexpected recalibrations within Delacroix’s paintings—so much so that undeniably secondary elements were identified as the sites of Delacroix’s significance for nineteenth-century French art. We saw responses that blithely omitted great swathes of individual canvases or ignored chronological inconsistencies. The bemusement I will discuss in this chapter— of the French art critic Étienne-Jean Delécluze describing Delacroix’s Chios— seems different in kind from the varieties of appreciation traced in Chapter 1, yet piecemeal patterns of attention are again central, and the depiction of inaction emerges again as a proprietary trait of Delacroix’s painting.

1 By 1824, with the Prix de Rome and long years of studio training receding in significance, the Salon had taken its place as the single most important event in French painting, so it’s not surprising that Delacroix felt buoyed by Cogniet’s encouraging words. Crow, Patricia Mainardi, and Elisabeth Fraser, among others, have emphasized these changes.1 Marie-Claude Chaudonneret’s focus on Auguste de Forbin, directeur général des Musées during the Restoration, has shown that a Salon that welcomed Delacroix in addition to the latest arrivals from David’s studio was a direct result of Forbin’s intricate managing of the monarchy’s artistic policies. According to Chaudonneret, the 1824 exhibition was underpinned by eight years of institutional consolidation.2 The previous chapter indicated how stylistically opposed chapters of Neoclassicism followed by Romanticism have appeared to scholars as less and less likely to offer a satisfactory narrative of French painting of the early nineteenth century. Delécluze makes a frequent appearance in discussions of the 1824 Salon, however, because of his involvement in contemporary debates between “romantics” and “classicists.” These exchanges have long presented a fundamental reason for the exhibition’s importance. In this familiar classification, Delécluze’s writings offer a conservative foil to the approach of Stendhal, whose “latter-day prestige,” to use Crow’s phrase,

Jacques-Louis David Leonidas at Thermopylae, detail of fig. 30

28 Eugène Delacroix Chios, detail showing central figures

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has ensured that he remains probably the best known of the exhibition’s critics.3 Against Stendhal’s commentary, which has invariably appeared progressive, Delécluze inevitably cuts an old-fashioned figure,4 and the bracing rhetoric of Stendhal’s “Salon of 1824” did indeed present Delécluze as an adversary. Nonetheless, I won’t discuss Stendhal at any length in this chapter: instead, Chapter 5 will consider his most ambitious piece of art criticism within the important context of his nonfiction writings. In the ramifying cultural debates of the 1820s, the role played by the criticism of the 1824 Salon was vital but partial. Played out as they were across a number of arenas at varying times, the differentiating terms of these debates, including those used by Delécluze, are modulated by context.5 And as is often noted, these discussions didn’t begin in 1824, and nor did they end then.6 These considerations by no means erode the importance of the exhibition at which the Chios was first seen. In the livret of the Salon of 1824, Delacroix gave the full title of his major entry as Scenes from the Massacres at Chios, Greek Families Waiting for Imprisonment, Slavery, etc.7 (see fig. 1). His chosen subject was the aftermath of an episode of protracted bloodshed from the Greek War of Independence (1821–7).8 Critics at the time found the painting notoriously difficult to assess. Imposing figures dominate the painting’s foreground, but the title of the painting gave them no help in identifying which of these figures should be considered the most important. They noted a fragmentation and obscuring of bodies, a thickening and thinning of paint across the surface of the painting, and a sudden snaring of the attention by precise details, precise expressions. A figure of a bearded Greek male lies near the center of the composition (fig. 28). He assumes a classic recumbent pose and is almost entirely nude. Stretched out among other figures also depicted as slumped or seated on sandy ground, he can hardly be described as completely different from his companions—they also seem exhausted and wounded. Yet time and again, whether or not they liked or disliked the Chios, contemporary viewers professed themselves drawn to this one figure in particular. The appeal this figure held for Delécluze is surprising. A former student of Jacques-Louis David and later his biographer, Delécluze was by 1824 already an eminent figure, in the first year of his long tenure as art critic for the Journal des débats.9 In the history of nineteenth-century French painting, few critics were more resistant to innovation, more assiduous in tending the Davidian flame than Delécluze. He appears to be an obvious example of “les immobiles,” those opponents of change of whom the seemingly more open-minded critics in 1824 despaired.10 Nevertheless, as Lee Johnson has noted, Delécluze’s comments on Delacroix’s Salon submissions could be quite favorable.11

29 Jacques-Louis David Intervention of the Sabine Women, 1799 Oil on canvas 12 ft. 8 in. × 17 ft. 3/4 in. PARIS, M U SÉE D U LOU VRE

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Delécluze’s stature as a critic has garnered particular attention of late, and Michael Fried has long underlined the importance of his criticism. Scholars have investigated the fraught experiences of his childhood and student years, on the one hand, and his theoretical pronouncements and role as cultural arbiter, on the other. As Nina Athanassoglou-Kallmyer and Philippe Bordes have pointed out, however, a closer focus on the individual positions and character of art critics from the period of the Bourbon Restoration in France is overdue.12 In the case of Delécluze, his critical engagement with particular paintings remains rather broadly rendered, and his tendency to praise Delacroix has yet to be explored.13 In 1824, Delécluze’s attention was clearly drawn by just one element of the Chios. He twice called Delacroix’s recumbent male the “most remarkable figure” in the painting, and twice noted his perplexing, compelling expression. He referred to the figure as “wounded, bleeding,” and even “stupefied by his misfortune.” Delécluze valorized this injured figure beyond all other elements in the composition, going so far as to credit him with the ability to resolve Delacroix’s otherwise muddled painting: “[H]is facial expression,” observed Delécluze, “beautiful in itself, seems in some way to be the explanation of the rest of the composition, which is too confused.”14 Delécluze’s uncommon praise prompts this chapter’s interpretation of the Chios’s focal figure. This interpretation departs from previous readings of the same figure, principally because of what I describe as Delécluze’s changing views of David’s history paintings, specifically the Intervention of the Sabine Women (1799) and the Leonidas at Thermoplyae (1800–14) (figs. 29, 30, 39).15 The convention of heroic male nudity in both canvases has generated scholarly notice. Art historians have striven to make sense of effects so totalizing as to lead to what Alex Potts has called the “monism” of the Leonidas. Ewa Lajer-Burcharth attributes such “strenuous demonstrativeness” to the “narcissistic theater of inter-male identification and desire” that David’s studio became during Delécluze’s student years.16 The effects of such “demonstrativeness” on male artists painting in the wake of David has received much attention. For example, the tradition of the académie has offered a route along which consideration of David’s importance for the Chios, especially its slumped central figure, can proceed. But these various readings indicate why it’s important to come to a full understanding of the persistence of David in the context of the 1824 Salon. My view of Delécluze has been shaped in particular by a recent disappearance: under pressure from a range of scholarly initiatives, there is now little trace of the belief that the decline of the Davidian tradition was inevitable, uncomplicated, or painless. As a result, I believe, Delécluze can be described as virtually impaled on a concern for the future viability of the tradition of

30 Jacques-Louis David Leonidas at Thermopylae, 1800–14 Oil on canvas 12 ft. 11 in. × 17 ft. 5 in. PAR I S , M U S É E DU L O UV R E

David. As Bordes has recently emphasized, the situation of history painting in 1824 was not divided between those impatient for innovation and others of a more recalcitrant bent.17 Delécluze’s praise of Delacroix’s painting should be seen therefore not only in the context of his suspicion toward Delacroix and his peers, but also in the light of his dismay about the contemporary representatives of the tradition of David. Two history paintings are exemplary: the Germanicus on the Battlefield of Varus (fig. 31) by Alexandre Abel de Pujol, and The Separation of Polyxena and Hecuba (fig. 32) by Michel-Martin Drolling.18 Both were shown in the 1824 Salon. On the one hand, the presence of such “fossilized” grandes machines on the walls of Restoration Salons has long appeared a familiar symptom of the ailing condition of the tradition of David by 1824.19 On the other hand, Abel de Pujol and Drolling had benefited from two experiences essential to major French painting well into the first third of the nineteenth century. They had received a grounding in draftsmanship, imparted by their Davidian training; then they spent a period of concentrated study in Rome. Neither of these factors, however, were mentioned by critics, who in 1824 were horrified by the inadequacies of Abel de Pujol and Drolling.20 All the more important, then, to recapture the reasons for Delécluze’s concern. The focal figure in the Chios has already been the subject of numerous discussions by other scholars, which embrace a large number of considerations. In particular, scholars have identified his ability to concentrate or evoke larger

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changes and developments in French painting and society. Most recently, he has been instrumental in Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby’s arguments for the sustained and anguished imperatives of empire and race for early nineteenth-century French history painters.21 Two aspects of the Chios’s focal nude have received particular attention. First, his evocation of passive suffering: the dissolution of family made everywhere apparent in the Chios is, for Fraser, exemplified in the subjugated figure depicted as its focus.22 The echoes of a Lamentation scene at the center of the Chios have been noted by Athanassoglou-Kallmyer, who has seen a Christ-like body bowed by Turkish victors.23 Second, for Chaudonneret, the figure highlights what is not here—a conventionally heroic center—and it was this omission that drew the critics’ wrath. On the other hand, the embodiment of transgressive power in this figure has been elaborated by Grimaldo Grigsby. She suggests that Restoration France’s deepest anxieties about race appear nowhere more uncomfortably palpable than in the Chios’s recumbent “giant” at the center, who invokes the sacrosanct role the académie had been awarded in the studio of David.24 Delacroix’s commitment to a subject taken from the Greek War of Independence must be understood, she believes, against this backdrop. These assessments embrace a large number of considerations. My explanation follows a narrower seam: Delécluze’s writings, including his biography of David and his fantastical novella of 1832, The Mechanical King, are to the forefront of my attention, and one other critic plays an important role in this disclosure. The brevity of Auguste Chauvin’s career as a Salon reviewer is reflected in the paucity of biographical material on his life and work.25 Nonetheless, Chauvin’s highly opinionated views often crop up in discussions of the “Salons of 1824 and 1827”, his somewhat bluff approach contrasting with Delécluze’s grave exactitude of tone.26 His criticism leaves us in no doubt that his first loyalty was to the tradition David founded, and yet Chauvin’s particular judgments contain intriguing knots of illogic. They are, I believe, indispensable to an understanding of Delécluze’s response to the Chios. On first inspection of the Chios, Delécluze failed to gravitate to any one figure in particular. Instead, he identified the “town of Chios” in his opening remarks on the painting: “[a]t some distance from the town of Chios, noticeable beside the sea, men, women, and children are piled up, almost naked and all bruised from blows and wounds.”27 The phrases “at some distance” and “noticeable beside the sea” do not convey the extent of Delécluze’s inspection of the background. He had to range over the hazy swathe of land behind the figures and under the huge expanse of sky in order to nominate the scattering of white flecks and blocks as the inhabitants’ “town”—small, sharp shapes

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in the background, highlighted by a plume of smoke, indicating the Turkish decimation of the island’s population. Unnoted by the diligent Delécluze were the jagged breaks of pale turquoise that sporadically break the sky’s expanse— probably because they do little to interrupt the thinly applied hues of yellow which suffuse the Chios overall. For Delécluze, this creeping color exacerbated the stasis of the foreground figures. “Not only is the arrangement of the scene appalling,” Delécluze said, “but it seems that [Delacroix] took it in hand to make it more hideous still, by the cadaverous tint stretching over the whole picture.”28 Before parting, then, and with a compliment of bemused fascination, Delécluze tried to supply narratives for the Chios. While other critics’ first look at the painting did not take them further than its foreground huddle, Delécluze extended his reach into the background in an attempt to locate the scene’s topographical co-ordinates. The tenor of his eventual praise for the Chios’s central figure also departs from other critics’ approval of that figure. To be sure, several other viewers in 1824 were drawn to what they saw as an enigmatic expression. Delécluze, however, was the only critic who saw in that

31 Alexandre Abel de Pujol Germanicus on the Battlefield of Varus where Varus and his Legions were Massacred by the Germans, 1824 Oil on canvas 15 ft. 5 in. × 22 ft. M U S ÉES D ’A RT E T D’ H I S T O I R E , L A R O C H E L L E

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32 Michel-Martin Drolling The Separation of Polyxena and Hecuba, 1824 Oil on canvas 10 ft. 4 in. × 12 ft. 7 in. M U S ÉE CR O ZATI ER , LE P U Y- EN - V ELAY

expression a reparative or restorative potential for the painting as a whole. This is why the context of his writings overall proves so helpful. A look at other examples will reveal his entirely characteristic response to paintings.

2

33 Michel-Martin Drolling The Separation of Polyxena and Hecuba, detail of Polyxena’s face

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The following three examples reveal the depth of Delécluze’s engagement with works structured by, as he saw it, sovereign or compelling figures. The first example is Drolling’s Polyxena and Hecuba (see fig. 32). “In the large painting of Polyxena torn away from her mother Hecuba by Ulysses,” Delécluze approvingly noted, “there is an extremely beautiful face, that of the young victim” (fig. 33).29 Here, Delécluze described the artist’s choice of a scene from Euripides in which the doomed and sacrificial Polyxena is singled out by Ulysses. He didn’t mention the two female attendants depicted behind Hecuba. The figures of Ulysses and Hecuba did not earn a description either, even though Drolling widened their outstretched gestures so that Polyxena seems encircled by an expressive chain of hands. For Delécluze, the composition “scarcely offers any other merit” other than one “deeply enthralling face” which “M. Drolling was fortunately inspired” to paint.30 What compelled Delécluze about Polyxena’s face? “The young girl,” he says, “resigned [to her fate], gently raises her eyes toward the sky.”31 The scene’s pearly outdoor light casts hardly any shadow on the main figures, but its most radiant effects—a bright, whitish translucence—seem given to Polyxena’s features. Her expression impassive, her gaze distant, she seems as oblivious to her beseeching mother bent low in front of her as to the gaze of Ulysses. To Delécluze, it was the sense of Polyxena’s elevated gaze that assured him that her thoughts had already departed the scene; the thinning of paint, from the wreath’s opacity to the filament of white threading the iris, enhances the impression of a gaze cast “toward the sky.” Delécluze wasn’t the only viewer in 1824 to compliment Polyxena’s expression. Like the focal figure in the Chios, plenty of other critics noted its appeal—Daniel Arasse has noted how this portrayal won special acclaim for Drolling’s painting among critics and public alike.32 Not every critic was quite

so selective in his response to Polyxena and Hecuba as Delécluze, though, nor dispensed so completely with the other contemporary Davidians. Casting over a number of candidates from the Salon that might be considered worthy exemplars of the “School of David,” Delécluze concluded that he could find but one possible representative “of the doctrine that I defend: I only have the head of Polyxena, by M. Drolling.”33 This short pronouncement seems remarkably bleak. From the entire Salon, Delécluze winnowed down all that could be deemed worthy of the term Davidian to one particular head. Perhaps the first thing this extraordinary admission conveys is the undeniable impoverishment of the Davidian tradition by 1824 and Delécluze’s disappointment with its contemporary representatives. A devastatingly small selection made by a critic whose name remains indelibly linked to David’s: Delécluze must have intended his judgment to reverberate. No wonder disapproval of contemporary Davidian canvases is so keenly marked in his criticism. The parsimony of the selection also reflects on Delécluze’s response to favored paintings, or should I say, favored figures. At a pinch, he could focus on the best of a bad lot. His culling of the Salon in this way shows how only one figure, one face, one expression, one “extremely beautiful head” could appear sufficient to him even as he reluctantly narrowed down the expressive field of particular paintings, and even the Salon as a whole. As the following examples show, this reluctance was not that difficult for Delécluze to muster. My second example is Saint Geneviève Distributing Provisions during the Siege of Paris (1824; see fig. 34), by Jean-Victor Schnetz, an artist who eludes ready categorization. A former student of David’s, he had an idiosyncratic career trajectory that led him to Rome in 1817, following the frustration of his attempts at conventional advancement as a history painter. There he increasingly explored a specialized subject matter, which for critics at the time distinguished him from both the contemporary Davidians and painters like Delacroix.34 In 1824, religious imagery was to the fore of Schnetz’s attention, and he was encouraged by David himself in this direction, who congratulated Schnetz for pursuing subject matter best suited to his talents.35 Schnetz’s Saint Geneviève was well received at the “Salon of 1824”, and Delécluze was among its appreciative viewers. His gaze settled on the figure of Paris’s patron saint, who is depicted standing on steps at the composition’s center. “St Geneviève is seen within the walls of Paris, distributing provisions to the city’s besieged inhabitants,” as Delécluze put it.36 The heavy folds of her robe and habit lend the figure of St Geneviève a columnar stillness, while around her the famished populace assume poses variously animated and anguished. On the saint’s right, a group of figures, arms outstretched, converges upon the serene arrival in their midst. St Geneviève looked “not at all shocked” by a ravenous crowd,

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and Delécluze described her benevolence as follows: Toward the center of the painting … the Saint distributes … provisions; around her, men, women, and children extend their hands impatiently, sometimes even angrily, fighting among themselves, and paying absolutely no heed to St Geneviève’s good works, in the same manner as the Saint, who is not at all shocked by the greed of those who surround her, appears to sincerely obey her conscience, without thinking of her own self-sacrifice.37 Far more clamorous a scene is depicted in Schnetz’s painting than in the compositions of Drolling or Delacroix. In his response, Delécluze did not blot out the figures around St Geneviève, as he had with the entourage of the “enthralling” Polyxena. He obviously found himself unable to do so: the frantic Parisians encircling the saint appeared to him inescapable. In order to temper this disagreeable effect, Delécluze praised Schnetz’s adept use of contrast. Unlike Drolling, Schnetz portrayed a scene supposedly structured by interaction: one figure gives while others receive. Delécluze was having none of this. Schnetz’s contrast imparted the kind of division Delécluze preferred: “St Geneviève’s calm [expression] produces such a beautiful effect in the middle of these figures troubled by heart-rending passions, like the hunger that produced them.”38 Delécluze again isolated a compelling central figure, and that was enough. A motionless pose delighted Delécluze. He was immunized, as it were, from the effect of the lesser figures in the painting. This second example reveals a critic untroubled by compositional disparities, uninterested in an interplay of focal and subsidiary figures. Delécluze applauded Schnetz for weighing the composition in St Geneviève’s favor, even though a more equitable arrangement might have been truer to the painting’s charitable subject. My third example is the Germanicus (see fig. 31). Abel de Pujol fared badly at the 1824 exhibition: although his was the Salon’s largest painting, it was also its least popular. Depicted is the arrival of Germanicus, the great general celebrated by Tacitus, at the benighted battlefield where the ill-starred Varus and his legions had been laid waste by Germanic tribes resisting Roman rule. The scene portrays Germanicus leading an act of communal remembrance: a representative collection of the strewn bones mentioned by Tacitus appears in the left foreground, diagonally below the central figure’s raised right arm.39 Rhyming bands of outstretched arms and swords belonging to the three main figure groups encircle their commander, as the soldiers strike declamatory poses.40 Two of these groups flank Germanicus, who is depicted raising aloft his legion’s standard (fig. 35).

34 Victor Schnetz St Geneviève Distributing Provisions During the Siege of Paris, 1822 Oil on canvas 16 ft. 5 in. × 10 ft. 11 in. N O TR E- D A M E DE B O N N E N O UV E L L E , PA R I S

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Abel de Pujol’s Salon hopes, pinned on this solemn scene, were disappointed. Delécluze mused on the painting’s lack of success as follows: To what can be attributed the indifference the public shows to the painting of Germanicus on the Battlefield of Varus, painted by M. Abel de Pujol? The drawing is correct, the arrangement of the groups is well combined … and the painter has not omitted any episode that makes the subject understandable … However, one is not at all moved. I would confess for myself, having returned to experience this work three or four days in a row, that I did not feel any emotion at all.41 It is clear from Delécluze’s dutiful commentary that familiarity could not endear the Germanicus to him. He had conscientiously retraced his steps to study the painting. After all, the virtues of a Davidian training were in place: blameless competence and correct drawing—all well and good, and completely dreary. But Delécluze was moved to upbraid Abel de Pujol for depicting soldiers “too obviously imitated from the Thermopyles [sic] by M. David.”42 Delécluze identified the Leonidas (see fig. 30) as an obvious source for the Germanicus. Abel de Pujol proved that subtlety was not one of his strong points when he embarked on an enormous history painting with a composition centered on a famous general, who appears immobile and encircled by the more active figures of his many soldiers. The emblematic composition of the Leonidas can be summoned up by the same basic description. Delécluze’s comments on the Germanicus were consistent with those he made on the composition of other paintings, but his particularly low opinion of Abel de Pujol’s efforts showed that he did not privilege centrality in a work per se. Never the twain did meet, it seems: in Delécluze’s response to paintings, either concentrations of interest appear vested in a single face, figure, or character, sometimes to the detriment of the rest of the composition; or else a supposedly cardinal figure collapses into such “well-combined” kinship with all those around him that a possible contrast between different expressive registers is extinguished. For Delécluze, if no one figure could be singled out, then any particular claim to a superior position is neutralized, relegating all of the figures in advance to secondariness. Delécluze modulated the St Geneviève’s busy composition to his own specifications, thanks to the expressive qualities of its motionless central figure, but his viewing of the Germanicus remained uninterrupted by any comparable locus, and as a result his interest washed over de Pujol’s composition. He perceived the soldiers in the painting en masse, and they stayed that way.

35 Abel de Pujol Germanicus, detail showing central group with legion’s standard

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3 These examples indicate that Delécluze was drawn to paintings with favored or sovereign figures who appeared as if sealed off from the rest of the work and sufficient unto themselves. This point can be clinched by turning to an unexpected source in which Delécluze sharply illustrates this theme, drawing out in narrative form one possible set of ruthless consequences. The source is his 1832 novella, The Mechanical King.43 (The full text is reproduced in Appendix 1.) The story’s central character, a watchmaker and inventor called Michel, withdraws into a state of extreme isolation following the death of his beloved wife. His attention narrows to an intricate, fantastical box that he has made, imagined as a realm of his own fashioning over which he reigns as king. It is “a small world” that he can hold “between my hands and before my eyes.” He imagines it as peopled with miniaturized human beings, his subjects. Michel is cast as isolated but supreme. Not only is Michel given power over his imaginary world: his dominant role as sovereign—and this is the link to Delécluze’s responses to paintings in the 1824 Salon—becomes central to him in his isolation. It doesn’t take long before “despair and boredom” seize the lesser figures in the box, and as time wears on, the condition of these captive subjects worsens. Thus, under a different dispensation, duration, so important as a value for Delécluze (think of the imperturbable Saint Geneviève, or of Polyxena’s elevated gaze), can come to deplete rather than sustain. Michel records a terrible ebbing: “each day I would see them become thinner, more yellow, and for those who still retained some vigor, they would only use it to curse me and seek to break the hinges [of the box].” Releasing his subjects, however, would end Michel’s reign. As intolerable as matters have become, he feels paralyzed. The condition of sovereignty expands to such an extent that other considerations, other elements in the work fall away. “I would have wanted to change [the box]. Impossible! Do you appreciate the consequences? If I had released the mechanisms by a single notch, I would no longer have been the master of anything!”44 Michel’s predicament forbids him to countenance any change. The readiness with which Delécluze could alight upon on a favored figure in a painting was not kindled solely by the focal male nude in the Chios. The preceding examples have confirmed this propensity in his approach to paintings while also revealing that he could fail to address other elements in a given work with a matching intensity, and, on occasion, even allow them to languish in neglect. But now a fundamental difference between these other responses and his comments on the Chios becomes clear. In Drolling’s painting, Polyxena’s face seemed to Delécluze the single chink through which the light of Davidian

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idealism entered the Salon (see fig. 33). He found the depiction of her face captivating—it summoned a revered quality from outside the painting and admitted it into the exhibition—but Polyxena’s expression did not promise to improve anything within the precincts of Drolling’s canvas. In The Mechanical King, the superiority of one figure exacts a toll even from figures deemed subsidiary. Yet the focal figure in the Chios promised a solution to the rest of Delacroix’s painting: he was the one figure who could possibly explain this otherwise “confused” work. Given the unmistakable pattern in his writings, of which the response to the Chios forms a part, Delécluze’s appreciation of this painting’s pivotal figure now appears uncharacteristic. In other cases, we have seen Delécluze draw distinctions between different kinds of figures in a painting, but the relationships he identified as existing (or not existing) between them were not limited to matters of hierarchy or harmony. Of course, a hierarchical structure is indispensable to the responses I have examined, but it does not adequately account for Delécluze’s modus operandi. Here we arrive, I believe, at the heart of the matter, and our understanding of Delécluze’s perceptions in 1824 is accordingly deepened. The reparative qualities palpable for him in this part of the Chios may have seemed transformative, with agency for the painting as a whole ascribed to the pensive central figure. How did Delécluze arrive at this possibility? The reasons may lie earlier in his career. Delécluze’s character as a critic was famously steeped in his firsthand experience of the studio of David, on which he drew for his 1855 biography of the artist. His training coincided with the years in which David embarked on the Sabines, as well as the painting he conceived of as its pendant, the Leonidas. The development of both, most notoriously the latter, was protracted. Recollecting these years in his biography, Delécluze remembered the length of time that each canvas demanded, especially in respect to the painting of its central figures. He was emboldened to attribute to David the wish that the expression of Leonidas appear restrained and meditative, repudiating the instantaneous temporal unity binding together the figures depicted in his earlier history paintings from the 1780s, the canonical examples of which are the Oath of the Horatii (1785) and the Lictors Returning to Brutus the Bodies of his Sons (1789).45 Bordes has contended that Delécluze imputed this volte-face to the artist: it more accurately reflected Delécluze’s own views of the Sabines and the Leonidas.46 There can be little doubt but that the period around 1800 was one of profound reassessment by David in regard to his own painting. Nonetheless, Delécluze preferred to consign the Horatii and the Brutus to an inert past in David’s career, rather than imagine their expressive values as even residually present in the artist’s creative dynamic. In the Sabines, the peacemaker Hersilia plunges

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into the fray to effect a truce between the battling forces of the Sabines, led by Tatius, and the Romans, led by her husband Romulus (see fig. 29). Hersilia could not appear to be more actively engaged—she gives a speech, her arms flung out arrestingly—while in the later canvas, Leonidas could not be more apparently inward, steadfast in repose as his soldiers mill around him on the eve of their collective immolation. In each composition, though, the central figures appear singular, isolated, removed from the array of figures around them. In 1824, Delacroix’s ability to evoke these qualities captured Delécluze’s vivid attention. Was that because he was guided by his allegiance to the Sabines and the Leonidas? In 1824, Delécluze did not discuss his views about any particular painting by David. We have, however, a substitute voice in the person of Chauvin. In the same year, he provided a commentary on David’s career that proclaimed the excellence of the Sabines and the Leonidas. He said, in short, everything that we would expect to hear from Delécluze as I have just described him. Chauvin’s assessment unfolded as follows: [T]hese paintings of a higher order, such as the Oath of the Horatii, [and] the Death of the Sons of Brutus, in moving away from mannerism, from confusion, from conventional forms, did not however, initially attain the true aim that was intended. One sees in them theatrical poses: all the figures know that they are being looked at, and arrange themselves accordingly. The drawing is beautiful and exact, but cold, like the whole. In the Sabines, one notices more life, more movement, more abandon … If we go on a few years, this fusion is finally complete, and the Leonidas presents figures constitutive of a good history painting: serious style, lively and touching expression, simple poses, drawing and color that are striking in their truthfulness, a touch that is generous and sensitive.47 In his evaluation of David, Chauvin erased much of the oeuvre. He nominated David’s history paintings of the 1780s, especially the Horatii as a first period, with a second period marked by the Sabines and culminating in the Leonidas.48 To be sure, David’s career did not begin with the Horatii and even within the period of time from the Horatii to the Sabines, a more comprehensive account would need to include a continuum of other vitally important works.49 Chauvin was untroubled by such considerations. He preferred to maintain a ruthless bias. Only the reforming exigencies of their historical moment excused flaws (“away from mannerism, from confusion, from conventional forms”). In fact, a lessening of constriction in the rule of temporality over the depicted figures accelerated the specific improvements

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Chauvin identified in the later history paintings, as David succeeded in imparting a more convincing sense of animation: “one notices more life,” he wrote, “more movement, more abandon.” We might have expected to discover in Delécluze’s own writings from 1824 an avowal like this one from Chauvin’s review of the Salon, a passage in which aspiration and principle converged in the pattern we would predict for the eminent former student of David. Yet it was Chauvin who smoothed out a teleology of David’s history paintings in which the Horatii and the Brutus lag behind the more authoritative Sabines and Leonidas. How does this unexpected ventriloquism bear on our understanding of Delécluze’s regard for Delacroix’s painting? We have been anticipating that this regard might be traced back to his reverence for the Sabines and the Leonidas. If Chauvin’s criteria for painting so closely echoed those of Delécluze, we are entitled to assume that Chauvin shared at least some of Delécluze’s opinions, be they enthusiasms or dislikes. To see whether that was indeed the case, Chauvin’s views on the Germanicus and the Chios should be consulted, in the expectation that they are in at least broad agreement with Delécluze’s responses to the same paintings. Here is Chauvin’s commentary on Abel de Pujol’s painting (see fig. 31): Germanicus, beloved by the Roman people, entering the marshy forests with his followers, where so many brave soldiers had perished, is one of those great figures on which the overall value of the painting must be centered. It is on this that the emotion of the viewer depends … [I]f some other character claims the attention, draws the gaze, whatever the painter’s talent might be otherwise, it means that he measured neither his intention nor the means of his art. And yet, M. Pujol’s [sic] main error was that he destroyed this unity of interest indicated so perfectly in Tacitus’s simple story by a fictitious addition. Valerius, an old Roman soldier who had escaped the massacres, found refuge in the heart of the forest … Finally, he summoned up his strength and managed to return to the army’s ranks … [T]he old soldier, crawling at the feet of Germanicus, presented him with the eagle of the nineteenth legion … Tacitus says nothing about this old soldier, and still less about the eagle … Thus M. Abel Pujol did not put in his painting what should have been there and he overloaded it with a sentimental trick.50 Chauvin shared Delécluze’s low opinion of the Germanicus. But there the similarities between the two commentaries end. Abel de Pujol’s painting made Delécluze apathetic; it made Chauvin furious. Delécluze didn’t note any figure worthy of either praise or blame; Chauvin heaped blame on the central

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figures. He was appalled by the disservice Abel de Pujol’s figures did to the composition of the Leonidas, a painting Chauvin revered as the epitome of David’s history painting. At the center of the Germanicus Chauvin saw the “beloved” commander afflicted by the figure of Valerius at his feet, or more exactly, at his left knee, around which the interloper seems to curl (see fig. 35). Valerius’s exhausted obeisance, conveyed by the nudity and pose of a gangling académie, appears different from all other figures in the painting. The indignity of the thing seemed to make Chauvin livid, but his outrage had another source as well. It was not a matter of driving a hierarchical wedge between the figures; Germanicus’s superior rank vis-à-vis the obviously lesser status of his soldiers is not challenged by the interpellation of Valerius. In Chauvin’s eyes, Germanicus was hobbled not by a secondary element but by an unauthorized addition. The trespasser and his “trick” pried open what should have remained the “great figure’s” unassailability, hence Chauvin’s ire at the inclusion of the battered “eagle of the nineteenth legion.” The interloper’s right hand presses the standard into Germanicus’s left hand by means of a gesture that rather awkwardly extends upward and at the same time insinuates itself between the latter’s chest and arm. According to Chauvin, this gesture signified the “trick” lethal to the painting’s cardinal figure. Chauvin’s criticism of the Germanicus flowed from his understanding of the Leonidas, but diverged from that of Delécluze. Nevertheless, each critic saw how obviously Abel de Pujol had taken his compositional cues from David’s painting. Chauvin considered unity an indivisible property; since the composition’s order had unraveled instead of lodging itself in the figure of Germanicus, nothing could salvage the painting. As we have seen, Delécluze’s response to a painting didn’t depend upon a single “great figure” conferring unity. Still, it is difficult to describe either the Sabines or the Leonidas as anything other than pictures focused on great figures who ordain unity on all. With his vigorously “Delécluzian” judgments, Chauvin’s contributions to the 1824 Salon’s critical field reveal the unexpected extent to which Delécluze, at this point in his career, was not following the readings of David that later defined his interpretation of the artist’s achievements.

4 It is thus not surprising to discover that when Delacroix’s Chios came to Chauvin’s attention, his response was also at odds with that of Delécluze. But this reaction was of a slightly different nature from Chauvin’s judgment of the Germanicus. His commentary on the Chios carried none of the sharp assurance

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that characterized his analysis of Abel de Pujol’s disastrous attempt to augment the Leonidas. While calling Delacroix’s composition a “shambles” (boucherie), Chauvin turned to no figure in particular. All he could see was a “cold collection of men, women, and children,” each of whom appeared “dead or ready to take a last breath.” With this etiolated description, Chauvin retreated from his examination of the Chios. Instead, he looked beyond Delacroix’s submission to the Salon, invoking other paintings as instructional models for the Chios. Delacroix, Chauvin said, should study Poussin’s Massacre of the Innocents—a painting we have already seen Cogniet deliberating over in 1824—and AnneLouis Girodet-Trioson’s Revolts at Cairo (1798) (1810; fig. 36). Why had Delacroix depicted suffering and death in such an unfortunate manner? Best study these models, reasoned Chauvin, to show the young painter that he did not have to resort to the disagreeable means pursued in the Chios. Chauvin listed four characteristics that he believed were to be found both

36 Anne-Louis Girodet-Trioson Revolts at Cairo, 1798, 1810 Oil on canvas 11 ft. 8 in. × 16 ft. 4 in. CH ÂTEAU DE V E R S A I L L E S

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in Poussin’s scene and in Girodet’s interpretation of an episode from the Napoleonic campaign in Egypt. He approved of the sense of animation that fills both paintings: “Everywhere [in these paintings],” Chauvin remarked, “you notice cunning opposing force, interesting groups, points of rest, in short, a sort of peripeteia, in the middle of the carnage.”51 He stressed one final feature that may sum up (“in short”) the previous three. Although Chauvin was clearly happier describing paintings other than Delacroix’s, his description of these two works seems difficult to square with their actual characteristics. Instances of “cunning opposing force” might be described as one of the oppositional layers in the Revolt at Cairo (for example, in the attempt by the struggling figure on the ground to ambush the charging hussar by means of a pistol instead of his dagger).52 But the same phrase hardly describes the “tragic mask” of the mother “petrified by grief,” as Elizabeth Cropper has described her, pictured in the foreground of Poussin’s painting.53 As for Chauvin’s mention of “interesting groups,” this is a vague description that covers a multitude. Poussin portrayed a Roman soldier murderously intent on slaying another victim, while Girodet’s French soldier is seen pitching himself against a rebel opponent. Was the noncommittal “interesting groups” really the best phrase Chauvin could muster to describe these violent moments that structure each of his preferred paintings? In addition, it is no easy task to locate the “points of rest” that Chauvin imputed to both paintings. At a stretch, “points of rest” could be found in the Massacre of the Innocents, which is focused on a foreground group of three figures set in deep perspective. In Girodet’s scene of great compression, virtually packed with battling figures, it is impossible to locate such “points of rest.” On closer examination Chauvin’s list falls apart: neither of the two paintings he cited wholly supports the features he described. Can the same be said of the last and most specific item he mentioned, his recommendation for a “peripeteia in the middle of the carnage”? It can, I believe, because here Chauvin’s analysis fails most spectacularly. The evidence provided by Poussin’s and Girodet’s paintings dwindles altogether. And it dwindles, I believe, because neither of these compositions, depending as they do upon moments of tension endlessly held, is brought to a central resolving focus. The term peripeteia refers to a sudden or unexpected change or reversal introduced into a dramatic narrative or sequence of events and leading to its resolution and dénouement. But the operation of a peripeteia in the unfolding of a plot was only awarded its preeminent status by Aristotle when it met exacting conditions.54 As soon as it was released in the actions onstage, the intensity of the emotional charge the peripeteia evoked in the spectator gave proof of its remarkable power. Even so, it did not shatter the plot, even as it pierced the

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apparent logic of its progression. The turn that Chauvin sought is signaled in the phrasing of his list: the contrasting traits he described as materializing “everywhere” in paintings with “graphic subjects” end with a feature that, according to Chauvin, appears nowhere else but “in the middle of the carnage” they depict. Moreover, by referring to the term in the singular (“une sorte de péripétie”) and emphasizing its relevance for the center of a painting, Chauvin hewed to the term’s Aristotelian definition and its development in the context of French painting.55 It is difficult to resist the conclusion that Chauvin’s response to the Chios was also defined by the criteria of what he thought of as David’s second period of history painting. The example that ultimately presided over the terms of his engagement in this instance was, I believe, the Sabines. Chauvin’s culminating reference to a peripeteia asserted this specific connection, because here he identified the pivotal role played by the central figure of Hersilia in David’s painting (fig. 37). Her depicted action does not flow from the depicted events: the legendary conflict well underway, she intervenes to deliver her speech. Hersilia’s speech produces such an effect that it prompts the requisite change or reversal in the represented actions. The moment portrayed also contains the element of anagnorisis, the process of recognition deemed essential to the realization of a peripeteia’s potential. In the speech she was pronouncing in David’s painting, Hersilia insisted that the Sabine men recognize the inevitable. The rescue of their daughters, wives, and sisters would have been a worthy mission, had it been undertaken earlier, but revenge was now pointless. Hersilia begged them to acknowledge what they saw: unions had been made, children had been born. This appeal to the evidence of a chain of events, rather than a dependence on the compassion of the Sabine men, was also in accord with Aristotle’s emblematic insistence on the subordination of character to plot in the Poetics. Thus, Hersilia’s appearance alone at the center of the painting does not by itself make change possible; her irenic role is carried by her speech, with the reversal she effects in the violence, achieved by her pleading words.56 And as a figure by David, Hersilia is structurally bound to a high watermark of idealism: to quote Alex Potts, “a tension charged by an ethical value visibly ruptures the apparent classical unity of the picture.”57 The depiction of the eponymous commander in the Leonidas does not rely on an intervention of such arresting particularity; in the case of that sovereign figure, the dimensions of heroic action are rendered invisible (fig. 39). But Leonidas’s moment of contemplation before the battle is also inserted into the episodic activity pictured around him, at the very same time that he is exempted from the delirious and temporary animation that he has inspired.

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37 Jacques-Louis David Sabines, detail of Hersilia

At stake in Chauvin’s responses was the perceived efficacy of these cardinal figures: how their agency is secured. The evocation of Leonidas’s unmediated emotion is due to the putative value of his thoughts. Chauvin’s fury at Abel de Pujol’s foisting of a “sentimental trick” onto the “beloved” Germanicus was in proportion to his demand that the autonomy of a valorized figure be quarantined at all costs. This explains why his attempts to identify a peripeteia were so labored. His judgment of the Germanicus, on the other hand, was as clear as day, because Abel de Pujol had made Chauvin’s diagnosis effortless, due to his painting’s transparent appeal to the Leonidas. Chauvin was evidently a critic for whom contemporary painting in general, Delacroix’s included, stood or fell by the heroic exemplars of his notion of a second period in David’s history painting. His “Delécluzian” criteria didn’t change in front of the Chios. Yet a transparency of intention was perhaps the last thing a critic in 1824, least of all one with Chauvin’s robust principles, may have seen in Delacroix’s canvas. The tortuous progress of Chauvin’s commentary made clear the extent to which the Chios exacted a toll from him of a more disorientating sort than did Abel de Pujol’s Salon submission. He dismissed the latter because of the

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ruination of its central figure. The Chios, however, he judged as flawed by absence, not by ruin, so he did not proclaim it “destroyed.” Instead he met it with a recommendation for the provision of a focal action, specifically by means of a peripeteia, a pivotal event of such a decisive character that it could install itself at the heart of the matter and alter all around it. Chauvin’s recommendations for improving the Chios enable us to take the measure of Delécluze’s regard for the slumped figure he saw at the center of the painting. In Delécluze’s description of Michel’s retreat into ever greater isolation in The Mechanical King, the consequences for the main character’s captive subjects were made starkly apparent. Michel, appalled as he was by their debilitation, could not move himself to help them. He preferred to remain agonized, caught in the distended temporality of his subjects’ ordeal. Michel realized that in releasing his subjects he would effect a decisive and ameliorative reversal: in other words, any action on his part would have echoed the character of Hersilia’s intervention in the Sabines. Since Michel’s notion of himself as a solitary ruler had become his entire identity, the very capacity for heroic agency that defines the cardinal figures in David’s Sabines and Leonidas was blotted out. In the story, through capitulation to a selective focus, other elements fell away. To save his autonomy as sovereign, Michel was prepared to inflict hardship on those subservient to him. Eight years earlier, irresistibly drawn to certain qualities in the listless survivor depicted in the foreground of Delacroix’s Chios—qualities of duration, isolation, suffering, and immobility—Delécluze cautiously anointed this figure in his art criticism (fig. 38). The notion of a singular exemption, informed by his appreciation of David’s painting, was so integral to his critical sensibilities that Delécluze needed to see such figures as bereft of the secondary or accompanying figures whom they already overshadowed. In front of the Chios, however, Delécluze demonstrated that he had no more insight into the precise origin of the expression of the painting’s most prominent figure than did any other of the numerous critics of the day who found themselves similarly captivated. As art historians have consistently noted, from the moment Delacroix’s canvas took its place on the Salon’s walls, the Chios remained impervious to the interpretative ministrations it constantly invited. Such was the contemporary appeal and frustration of the painting. Delécluze, wondering about the meaning of the composition’s most arresting expression, was no exception to this pattern. He saw a figure he described as “wounded, bleeding, and as it were, stupefied by his misfortune,” under a pall of exhaustion and sickness that he characterized as “stretching over” Delacroix’s painting. He emphasized that this “misfortune” had been visited on him: he referred to a figure “in

38 Eugène Delacroix Chios, detail

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his prime” who appeared to retreat way from the scene and into his own thoughts. What were these thoughts? It seemed evident to Delécluze—and this is the crux of the matter—that the figure’s thoughts were powerful enough to exempt him from the forces that stalked the desolate scene around him, and even to repair the overall confusions of the painting. He could not identify or readily fasten on their possible meaning. Yet as we have seen, the uncertainty remained beguiling: it was a structural component of his evaluation.

5 The consequences of Delécluze’s perplexed attraction can now be exactly defined. First, he responded to a simultaneity of effects, not a sequence. He saw the male nude at the center of the Chios as “stupefied.” At the same time, he thought that his expression was “beautiful,” and he even saw the glint of a steelier emotion: Delacroix had allowed “a half-smile [to] escape, as if [this figure] had the idea that some day he will be revenged.” Did this figure seem faltering or furious; was he about to expire or did he seem adrift on a reverie of future revenge? Delécluze was not sure. The expression Delécluze described, unlike his accounts of Drolling’s sacrificial Polyxena or Schnetz’s columnar Saint Geneviève dispensing charity, accommodated a number of effects all at once. Second, Delécluze found the impression that Delacroix’s figure had been granted a level of distance from his surrounding just as credible as his suffering. The moment of lapsing from the scene had produced the successful effect of a release from his terrible surroundings, even as the source of that release became, as it were, unavailable for apprehension at that same moment. In other words, it was not the case that Delécluze glimpsed a number of vying, submerged emotions that released a particular figure from turmoil and suffering. Instead, he perceived the quality of this remission as a singular expressiveness in and of itself. This explains why Delécluze perceived a simultaneity of effects, not a sequence. By contrast, in Drolling’s painting, he read Polyxena’s expression as the result of a sequence of thoughts ascending to the nobility of her resignation. Delécluze was unable to settle on one precise point of origin for the expression of the central figures in the Chios because such an origin was blocked by the very same lapse to which he responded. His vacillation between different states of mind for this figure, from an attenuated grasp on life to his musings on revenge, is a symptom of an occluded source. Third, Delécluze construed a particular relation between his loyalty to the tradition of David and Delacroix’s approach to painting. Delécluze was not prompted to attribute a kernel of enlightenment of extrinsic intervention to

39 Jacques-Louis David Leonidas at Thermoplyae, detail of Leonidas

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the expression he isolated from the Chios. He was granted that perception in the cases of Schnetz’s depiction of Saint Geneviève and also, especially, in Drolling’s figure of Polyxena. He claimed that the latter’s gaze, cast “toward the sky,” forged the 1824 Salon’s only complete link to the tradition of David: he saw in this gaze, I believe, an already accomplished sequence of heroic thought. This imparted to Drolling’s depiction of Polyxena the same superior isolation familiar to Delécluze from the figures of Hersilia and Leonidas. (Recall, however, the cost at which this came: Drolling depicted a scene supposedly defined by Hecuba’s desperate forfeiture of her daughter.) I asked whether Delécluze might have been drawn to Delacroix’s depiction of the male nude in the Chios because this figure conveyed to him a transformative capacity, harking back to the centralized compositions of the paintings he held dear. It is now possible to conclude that this was not the case. In my view, the most telling aspect of Delécluze’s unexpected praise was not a surprising show of respect for a Salon arriviste, but the fact that he did not credit the principal figure in Delacroix’s painting with any similarly transformative ability. It is necessary, therefore, to emphasize how this particular acknowledgment by Delécluze cannot be taken as an anomaly, within the ingrained or anachronistic patterns of judgment by a conservative critic. I am not suggesting that the history paintings he had watched David compose necessarily diminished in importance for this most Davidian of critics, but those models did not prescribe his reactions to the work of every contemporary artist exhibited at the “Salon of 1824”. In this chapter, Delécluze has not been treated as one voice from a critics’ chorus. His views have emerged as susceptible to complex change over time, and they were liable to differ significantly even from other apparently conservative critics. Chauvin seemed to hope that a model of heroic subjectivity still rooted in the Sabines and the Leonidas might survive and prosper if only young painters would zealously exalt individual, heroically nominated figures. By contrast, we can take it that Delécluze did not continue to hold fast to these history paintings as the redoubtable exemplars of ethical heroism that they so very reliably remained for Chauvin. Delécluze’s historically grounded awareness of developments in French painting is figured, I believe, by the starkness of his 1832 account of Michel’s tortured stasis in The Mechanical King. In Michel’s rapid descent from isolation into obsession, the limits of the operative mode governing David’s Sabines and Leonidas were quickly reached and then strained beyond any reasonable extension. The speed with which Michel found himself at an impasse was no surprise. He had begun in bad faith. His descent started with his adamant self-installation as sovereign, for he had compromised the capacity for any

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mediating agency in his superior role. In 1824, Delécluze perceived how Abel de Pujol had also begun the Germanicus in bad faith. His inaugural gesture was historically corrupt; he had chosen to depend upon an historically inappropriate model for his painting, one whose viability was exhausted. No wonder Delécluze saw nothing but numbing dreariness in the Germanicus. Delécluze’s sensitivity to the evidence of historical corruption went along with a selective openness to certain forms of change—but only those that offered a severely restricted range of means. Later art historians have modified the earlier view of the paintings of the Restoration as subject to classification by stylistically opposed chapters of Neoclassicism versus Romanticism. In a number of rigorously contextual accounts of Delacroix’s arrival in the Salon at the beginning of the 1820s, the term Romanticism has retreated or become a distant murmur. By contrast, Romanticism as a descriptive category assumes greater interpretative purchase in accounts of Restoration painting that form the emerging discourses on historical representation, theatrical criticism, and literary debates that grew apace throughout the 1820s. Delacroix’s historical placement in 1824 tends therefore to intersect with rather than occupy any one of a number of differing conceptual frameworks in which Romanticism, the term which for many defined the character of his painting, has undergone substantial revision or diminution. In this chapter I have adopted a narrow focus and invoked a limited array of paintings in order to specify a changing model of subjectivity that Delécluze perceived at the time in the Chios. He glimpsed a precise variation wrought on the Sabines and the Leonidas in the expression of the central male nude in Delacroix’s painting. Delécluze’s identification differs from the connections that scholars have previously seen between David’s painting and Delacroix. The focal figures Delécluze admired in David’s history paintings are exempted from the scenes in which they are depicted, in order to ameliorate the represented action. Even the reposeful figure of Leonidas remains heroically active. This was evidently not the case in the Chios, as Delécluze saw. His vacillating praise for one expression acknowledges the ebbing interest of many artists in 1824 in depicting a purposefully heroic subjectivity emblematic of the Davidian tradition and of Neoclassicism in general. What has turned out, I believe, as the most surprising aspect of Delécluze’s appreciation of one figure in the Chios is that it was unaccompanied by regret that its “beautiful” effect was non-narratable—incapable of effecting change.

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Chapter 3 Paint that Divides and Gathers

Patterns of devotion and consistency attended by a formidable—if submerged— capacity to register change: by disclosing such characteristics in the writing of one of nineteenth-century France’s most important art critics, the previous chapter led us to understand anew David and Delacroix’s departure from previous models of depicted subjectivity. The Delécluze of 1824 was given more pause for such contextual thought than he could quite assimilate. And yet this thematic, crucial as it is, does not cast light on a question important to any discussion of Delacroix’s work: the innovative and unusual paint surface of the Chios and the particular ways it was understood at the time. A topic still awaiting a finer focus is the painting of this consummate painter. While much has been said in praise of Delacroix’s innovations in brushwork and color, many of these discussions have not gone very far. With notable exceptions, there has been relatively little examination of how his facture works in any specific instance—how exactly it succeeds at being innovative and interesting, taken in the context for which it was painted.1 As we saw in Chapter 1, while Signac’s attention to areas of canvas richly worked by Delacroix was second to none, he plucked his examples hither and yon across the different decades of Delacroix’s career. Signac didn’t care why Delacroix painted the way he did; what mattered for Signac was his own teleological history of Neo-Impressionism. His account is unabashed; usefully so, because of how familiar the perception of Delacroix’s painting as a precursor to Impressionism has become. But Delacroix’s facture and color, especially when studied in the close-up detail some commentators have delighted in, often send us back to the subjects they supposedly dissolve. This chapter examines an instance of such a circuit: a particular female figure from the Chios. I also offer some thoughts on the figure of the horse, characterized as it is by a most curious depletion of density. Before I turn to this analysis, however, further remarks are required about the tradition of commentary on Delacroix’s facture. This tradition, I believe, is not just a residue of the veneration once paid to the “illustrious” Delacroix I conjured at the opening of Chapter 1. It is a place of hollowness in the literature, especially in the plentiful monographs of mid- to late twentieth-century

Eugène Delacroix Chios, detail of fig. 1

40 Eugène Delacroix Chios, detail of the figure of the mother

vintage, exactly because of the degree to which Delacroix’s name has become generally identified with an unmatched and enterprising fluency in oil paint. This identification is resilient, apparently even permanent. On the one hand, a keen responsibility to the range of often imperiled or tumultuous contexts in which Delacroix’s paintings were made—especially the crumbling monarchies of the 1820s and 1830s—certainly ensures against scholarly descents into adjective-driven or inconsequential passages about loose brushwork. On the other hand, the gravitas of contemporary events, which looms in some discussion of Delacroix’s painting, does not, in and of itself, fashion a new version of the artist which evicts well-established notions of painterliness. As a result, such accounts find it difficult to dent the shallow wisdom of accounts of a generalized painterliness. Old saws about bravado technique won’t disappear just by virtue of their obvious unpopularity.

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More is needed, I believe: the tradition of automatically genuflecting to Delacroix’s supposed mastery of facture has to be directly acknowledged and addressed. After all, it isn’t easy to point to an array of well-known sources for the general renown in which Delacroix’s painting is held. To be sure, there has been no recent large-scale padding of his reputation for dazzling color, dashing brushwork, and so on. But neither is there any evidence that his reputation as a painter is in any danger of expiring. Mention of Delacroix’s facture seems able to launch any inquiry into his painting, regardless of its subsequent methodology. The result is that the familiar wisdom about his masterly facture can withstand even radical excursions from its authority, because of the continued need for that authority.

1 Consider, in this light, a female figure from the Chios, identified as a mother in contemporary discussions of the painting and depicted in the painting’s right foreground next to the figure of the old woman discussed in Chapter 1 (fig. 40). Mention of this figure crops up in almost all contemporary reviews of the Chios. She is the first figure Thiers included in his description of the painting. Her depiction is cut off by the right-hand edge of the canvas: her body, stretched out on the ground, is visible only as far as her knees. Her face is turned at an angle toward the child balanced on her naked stomach, but she makes no move to hold him: her arms lie by her sides. Her unresponsiveness must have contributed to the confusion that reigned in contemporary references to her: critics couldn’t tell whether she seemed dead or alive. Marie Aycard and Frédéric Flocon described her as a “young woman thrown down on the ground, and who has lost consciousness[;] a small child is asleep on her breast.”2 Thiers said that the mother is “already dead.”3 Stendhal also referred to a mother “who is already dead.”4 Anne-Louis Girodet-Trioson, who was a member of the Salon jury in 1824, admired a mother whom he saw as still alive, if failing. It was the “poignant pain of the young mother” that attracted him in the first place. The cornerstone of Girodet’s response to the mother was that she seemed sentient and suffering. He responded to the “touching and well conceived” way in which the figure of the mother is painted, with an “expressive eye.” That “expressive eye” is marked by a thin stripe of anxious, raised eyebrow (fig. 41). The eye appears softly brushed in, partially dissolved. Shadow dusts the mother’s eyelid and a suggestion of veins appears on her pale skin: tendrils of purple glimmer on her

41 Eugène Delacroix Chios, detail of the mother’s face

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42 Eugène Delacroix Chios, detail of the place where the old woman’s side touches the mother’s body

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temple, neck, and breast. Delacroix painted her mouth as halfopen, or more specifically, her mouth appears to have fallen slightly open. Her teeth are evoked by a skimmed line of white paint which sets off the blackish-violet color of her lips. Thus her lips echo the color of her veins and suggest a lifeless state. The mother’s abundant black hair encloses her head and upper body in a border of dark cloud. The inky hair contrasts with the pallor of her face, and sets off her slightly blurred facial features, especially the eye that attracted Girodet. Chapter 1 identified the increasing dominance of such softened features in all the faces Delacroix depicted, especially female faces. In the Chios, however, this reign is by no means yet established. This point is vital to my argument about the facture of the stretchedout young mother, and not only because she is depicted right next to the old woman. As we also saw in Chapter 1, the latter’s crisply specific jaw line and tautly angled skin resolutely escape Baudelaire’s description of the old woman’s face as “so wrinkled and forlorn” (see fig. 26). The differences between Delacroix’s portrayal of the old woman and the figure he painted to her left play a significant role in my argument about the kind of facture we see in the latter. Take, for example, the differences evident as soon as we look at the point where the elbow of the old woman touches her neighbor’s hair (fig. 42). The paint immediately shifts from cloudy blackness to the bluntly painted stripes, matte and opaque in texture, that run down the old woman’s sleeve. But while the paint is assertive, thick, we know from Chapter 1 that nothing about the figure of the old woman can be described as broadly or loosely painted. Not only are her facial features and the shape of her head built up with the sharp and clean solidity that attracted Cogniet, but the same can be said about her layers of clothing, defined by short, articulated brushstrokes (see fig. 12). This bluntness is very different from the melted edges and soft contours of the young mother’s face and breast. Bundled up in layers of heavily patterned fabric, all assertive texture and thickness, there’s a general sense of robustness and density to the figure of the old woman—the paint is indubitably opaque and even slightly chalky in places—which was underlined by the complaint of one anonymous critic who objected to “these clashing brushstrokes which pile up colors one next to another, without binding them together or not giving them any harmony.”5 At some point, then, we would expect the critics’ commentaries to mention the differences between the figures—they’re placed side by side, after all. But this does not occur. The young mother is quite different from the figure next to

her in pose and expression—but not, it turns out, in terms of density of paint. The transition from the old woman’s striped sleeve to the hair of the mother is deft: the latter doesn’t so much prop herself up against the old woman as appear to float alongside her. Her hair acts as a black pillow set against sturdier edges; in this way the young mother appears cocooned onto herself. This inventory of paint densities adds a surprising element to Girodet’s praise for the Chios: the softness of detail noticed in the figure of the mother does not mean that the thickness of paint is any less robust than that used for the old woman. This unexpected thickening of paint is a key characteristic of the apparently soft, tender figure of the mother. Yes, her “expressive eye” is softly brushed in. But the paint is not substantially thinner or more transparent than the paint that coats the figure of the old woman (see fig. 12). And yes, the very idea of such a figure of a young mother, with a tracery of veins, a gloss of teeth, mouth, and lips, would seem to call out for the use of glazes and transparency. These effects, as Jack Spector has pointed out in detail, are used across Delacroix’s later painting, The Death of Sardanapalus (see fig. 3). Three years earlier, however, even the filigree of veins we see on the right-hand temple of the young mother was painted with the same kind of fatty pigment Delacroix used for the figure of the old woman.6 As a result, this particular filigree appears as if laced over rather than under the surface of the young mother’s skin (see fig. 41). One critic even compared the paint used to describe her complexion as “whiting” (or blanc d’Espagne), a term that suggests pallor as well as opacity and thickness.7 We’ve seen how uncertainties about the lifeless (or otherwise) effect of the mother’s pose and expression abound in contemporary descriptions of this figure. The thickly applied paint Delacroix used is, I believe, at the heart of these uncertainties. For example, it is no coincidence that the critic who found himself reaching for the term “whiting” betrayed the greatest uncertainty about this mother’s affective state. Initially of the opinion that this figure looked as though she “has drawn her last breath,” he remained flummoxed by her face’s pallor, because “neither life nor death has ever given such a color to anyone.” Nonetheless, the blurred details, the melted contours of face and breast, the touches of violet on the lips and temples—all these elements are entirely in keeping with a perception of her as already dead or very nearly so: her body should appear slack, feeble, or limp (see fig. 40). How, then, to account for the uncertainty about her status, including Girodet’s impression that she seemed still alive? At this point it is helpful to return to another irresolute description of the figure of the mother. In their Salon, Aycard and Flocon described her not as lying on the ground, but as “thrown down,” suggesting a violent impact.8

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43 Eugène Delacroix Chios, detail of the arm of the mother

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With this in mind, look again at the mother’s right arm (fig. 43). A duncolored fabric covers the figure’s hand and arm up to her shoulder. This sleeve suggests a thick enough fabric—it’s in no sense transparent—yet her fist is clearly etched through it, while the fabric around her forearm is pulled into tight horizontal folds. The bond of pulled sleeve, forearm, and fist is such that she appears to have a greenish écorché for a right arm: Fabien Pillet recoiled from the impression of “arms” that appeared “petrified.”9 Grimaldo Grigsby has also noted that Delacroix portrayed the mother’s “clenched, draped hand as a disturbingly blackened, flayed fist.”10 The impression is that she has just slammed her arm down—or it has been “thrown down”—on the ground, hitting the earth with the side of her clenched fist. Lest there be any doubt, her hand appears to be pulling at the fabric so hard that the small, sharp arrow of her thumb—bent against her index finger—makes a peak from the horizontal folds encasing her arm, an example of what the critic Pillet described as the “dry and angular forms” of the Chios.11 Further, a vertical arc runs straight from the mother’s shoulder to the tip of her head: she appears stiff, propped up. The slammed-down arm and fist, the bent, strained neck, and her head set

at an angle: all these convey a strong impression of a high degree of pain—the pain that Girodet noticed in her expression. This means that the facture that constitutes the figure of the young mother is not only soft or blurred in its effect, but also appears harsh, rigid, and even ramrod straight. This combination helps to explain the confusion that contemporary viewers felt. The mix of elements also helps makes sense of why Delacroix used such thick paint to describe the figure of the mother overall, why he would have persevered with opaque paint for features as quintessentially evocative of membranous transparency as a half-open mouth, violet lips, and veins. The same kind of paint is perfect for describing the pulled fabric and sinews of her angular, stretched-out arm, and for evoking the lines of her stiff, uncomfortable, propped-up neck. It’s not surprising, then, that confusion reigned in the commentaries on this figure—how could it be otherwise, in a figure at once rigid and slack, alive and dead?

2 In Chapter 2 I referred to a thickening and thinning of paint across the surface of the Chios. My explanation of why Delacroix used a density of paint to build up both soft and sharp effects in the figure of the young mother does not therefore cover areas in the Chios where his brush carried much less volume, including its expanse of sky. This is a main reason for my attention to the figure of the horse, especially its head, the one foreground element set against the horizon line and sky (fig. 46). Nonetheless, even for forms articulated by much lighter swathes and touches of paint, we find effects of dispersal that ultimately resonate with those seen in the figure of the mother. Why just the head of the horse? Well, for contemporary critics, that was exactly the problem. “Can we be permitted to ask M. Delacroix,” one critic asked, “where the belly and rump of this horse are?”12 Thiers was also nettled by what he saw as scant regard for rendering this horse’s body. Delacroix, he said, “has made a horse that does not possess hindquarters.”13 These viewers marked the fact that Delacroix did not present them with the sense of a clearly defined, weight-bearing animal. The horse is part of the draining away of solidity in this area of the painting, part of a rippling spread of wheeling forms. The horse’s rearing body supplies the biggest curving shape of all, across which the commotion of figures in this area plays. As for the head, while the startled eye and flaring nostrils are hallmarks of equine agitation, they are here affixed to a curiously concave and diminutive skull (fig. 45). Crested by a shock of yellowish mane, the head appears shiningly white. It is also flushed smoky brown and gray around the nostrils, ears, and

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eyes; intricate, gray tributaries of muscles and veins fan out around bit and bridle.14 By itself, this head looks as if it should be part of a fully rendered entity. But as Thiers and other viewers pointed out, this substantiation does not occur. Take that elevated front leg seen in profile below the raised head— it appears tucked in with a similarly inward-turned hoof pointing down at a slight angle (see fig. 44). This clips the impression of any forward movement, let alone any sense of a horse that rears. The leg is slim in profile, cut out in silhouette against a light background. Little density is allowed—not even a suggestion of supporting bone or sinew. Thiers wondered at the missing core: the horse, he said, “holds itself up inexplicably.”15 There was contemporary bafflement, then, about the whereabouts of the horse’s rump and belly—how could this animal even stand? And all of this depletion depends on the properties of oil paint. In the first instance, it is a matter of the horse’s crest of mane set against the painting’s sky (fig. 46). Thiers said that the horse seems to be “arriving at the gallop,” but as we’ve seen, he remained unable to consolidate his impressions into praise for a normatively portrayed horse.16 A galloping horse’s mane would be expected to look in some way agitated; this is not the case with the horse depicted in the Chios. Its mane stands up promisingly enough from the top of its head, but the effect is of a yellow-hued, feathery haze, light in color and light in texture of paint (see fig. 46). This haziness is enhanced because it is portrayed directly against the sky (fig. 47). Grimaldo Grigsby’s description of the horse’s head as breaking the “oppressive lid” of the horizon suggests a dissonant interruption of the sky. This is not the case.17 The horizon fades from the darkness it achieves on the left of the canvas to a much lighter hue in this area around the horse’s head, and the sense of a line softens as the lightness of the sky washes down into the patches of sea in front of the horse’s eyes. Further strands of lightness are brushed into the mane in the form of thin, wavy lines of pale impasto. In addition, only the mane of the horse rises above the horizon line, and the mane is as flat as the horizon itself. It is not rounded at the top, but is set parallel to and a bit higher than the horizon. Atmospheric effects sift into the horse’s mane. The mane is part of the horse, but it is shaped, shaded, and textured into the sky. A connective link between the two effects is formed by one single strand of the mane: rather than seek the sky, it falls down onto the horse’s head. This isolated lock wafts between the horse’s ear and its eye, but it too is painted in a textured, hazy fashion. It appears slightly powdery: a particularly dry brush must have been used: facture that offered Delacroix the ability to establish a relationship between the horse’s head and the rest of the painting. Because the profile of the horse’s head seems disconnected from the rest of his body—which is plunged in shadow—the snub, snowy head, accompanied by

44 Eugène Delacroix Chios, detail of the horse

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45 Eugène Delacroix Chios, detail of the head of the horse

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a sliver of white neck, seems to spring fully formed from the darkness below (see fig. 45). Patches of brushwork just as atmospheric are found across the Chios, so that the horse is allied with parts of the painting a significant distance away from it. Examples include the hanging patches of gun smoke near the center of the composition, and especially the plume of smoke that rises from the burning town of Chios in the background (fig. 48). The smoke is set in the far distance; remote from the figure of the horse. As noted in Chapter 1, the depiction of the town is one of the first items Delécluze mentions in his introductory description of the painting, although he didn’t elaborate on its portrayal. One of the reasons why I think this area makes an early entrance in Delécluze’s response is because its distinguishing smoke does not appear as far-flung and removed as its topographical location would indicate. The plume of smoke is strongly linked with the horse’s head, which also helps explain the fact that it wasn’t seen as buried mutely in the distance. The plume is the only other element in the painting to break the horizon line apart from the horse and rider (see fig. 47). This “break” also hews to the flat horizon. The long feather of smoke does not rise straight upward, but is blown horizontally to the left-hand side of the painting, and gradually curls above the sea before evaporating in a diffuse pennant shape set against one of the few patches of pale blue in the expanse of yellow. The shape, haziness, placement, and disposition of the isolated, curving plume echoes and complements the horse’s mane and head on the other side of the painting. In addition, just as the horse’s head is the highest point of the figural group on the right-hand side of the painting, the plume of smoke marks the apex of the figure group on the left-hand side of the composition. It is on the same level as the horse’s head and is directly across from it on the other side of the painting. There are no figures on the left-hand side of the painting set as high as the horse and rider on the right of the painting. But the smoke billows out just above and to the left of the head of the figure who is placed highest on the left-hand side of the painting: the seated Greek male, resting on the boulder in the extreme left foreground and holding his left side

(fig. 49). The top of his cap is roughly on the same level as the bottom of the horse’s head (see fig. 1). The plume is vaporous, not solid—that’s the subtlety of the thing—it rhymes with and balances the horse’s head, appearing in the same atmospheric register as the horse’s mane. This other element in turn underlines the atmospheric qualities of the mane. (This is one of many instances in which the tracking of surface elements sends us back to the painting’s subjects, in contrast to the reading of Delacroix’s facture as proposed by Signac and others.) All of these effects—the weakening of density and mass, the unsteadiness of disposition, the light-stepping gait and general delicacy, and the shafts of light and dark—depend on a certain permeability and dissemination of means. So much so that for at least two critics, the sense of the horse’s body evaporated completely: how can the horse even support itself, Thiers wondered. (The strangeness of the horse can also be examined in relation to Géricault’s depiction of horses, and the problematic relation of Delacroix and Géricault in the 1820s; this is explored in Appendix 2.)

3 Even if they pleaded indignation (the Chios was an “ambush,” said Pillet) or claimed to have fled from it (the anonymous critic for Le Diable boiteux declared that “I am not at all going to give any details of this truly demonic composition”), critics in 1824 found that the painting took a long time to look at before they could form any kind of impression, or series of impressions.18 Specific connections obtain between the protracted affective states of the Chios’s many figures and its complicated, uneven modes of paint. This was very much a matter of the partial nature of the bodies Delacroix portrayed— not least that of the horse. Pillet referred to an assortment of “arms and legs” while Charles-Paul Landon described the Chios’s composition as “a confused assemblage of figures, or rather of half-figures, because none of them offers a complete development.”19 Viewers felt at sea and stayed that way. Aycard and Flocon were pummeled by the “sullen and baleful weakness [that] is spread over the figures.”20 The same might be said about the critic who wrote

46 Eugène Delacroix Chios, detail

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47 Eugène Delacroix Chios, detail of the sky and mane

48 Eugène Delacroix Chios, detail of the landscape

under the name of “l’Amateur sans prétention.” Like Stendhal, he said that the Chios’s figures were “corpses” (Stendhal said “animated corpses”).21 Those who devoted pages of discussion to Delacroix’s canvas did not find that more time necessarily released more understanding. Aycard and Flocon, unlike Stendhal, wrote nearly eight pages about the Chios. Their discussion includes a wild stab at explaining the area of the painting containing the figure on horseback, the nude, and the male figure flinging himself at the horse (fig. 50). They improbably asserted that the hurtling figure is the distraught mother of the nude. Tellingly, this assertion was directed at the figure who is most evidently depicted in the throes of an action.22 But the Chios did not offer any area where critics could flock to make sense of it all—including this part of the composition, which offered them a swirl of permeable complication. Therefore, by lambasting all the individuals portrayed in the Chios as “corpses,” both Stendhal and the “Amateur” betrayed the vulnerability many critics must have felt on first viewing figures who seem to be an hiatus from determinacy. For art historians, such difficulties have traditionally supported an evaluation of the Chios as a categorically asymmetric painting with facture as uneven as its composition. Diverging from the opinion of most scholars who have written on the painting—Elisabeth Fraser emphasized a “visual

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49 Eugène Delacroix Chios, detail of wounded figure on the left-hand side of the painting

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and narrative fracturing” that “reinforces the overarching theme of defeat” and Grimaldo Grigsby referred to the “crumbling wall of figures” in the foreground—Barthélèmy Jobert says that the Chios’s composition is made up of two classically derived triangular wings, with symmetrical groups of figures amassed to balance each other harmoniously.23 The idea that the Chios’s figures are arranged in conventional, lucid ways is hard to share.24 This point of view runs contrary to the critics’ objections, in 1824, to the Chios’s irregularity, especially the almost universal complaints about sudden shifts in their

50 Eugène Delacroix Chios, detail of the group that includes male figure flinging himself at the horse

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perception of the painting. Critics were nonplussed when one kind of texture or element would abruptly transmute into another kind of texture or element. Jobert’s attention to “pyramidal masses” which he sees as “harmoniously composed” underlines the role and importance of resonances across the painting. But I have argued that these resonances are often to be found in the register of a shifting, changing facture that discomfited critics such as Pillet and Landon, and which the figure of the mother exemplifies to particularly painful effect. These shifts were a major cause of the critics’ vexation with the painting, but at the same time the unruliness of such changes held them, as we have seen, in front of the painting. The mother shares with other figures in the Chios an episodic and partly illegible negotiation of inner and outer states, in which the depiction of subjectivity is partial. But in the case of the mother—and this is important to understanding the apprehension of pain in viewers’ responses to her—that depiction seems at once partial and distended: a result, I believe, largely of the splintered facture, the vehicle for incursions of strain and wracked discomfort that are visible in the tilted neck and tensed arm. Summing up his discussion of the Chios, Thiers scolded Delacroix for “confusingly piling up figures about whom one can distinguish neither their state, nor their situation.”25 When Thiers said this, or when Landon harped on figures who fail to show a “complete development,” they were not simply commenting on the way in which many of the figures in the populous composition seem to crowd or cut off one another. Both critics tacitly gave up the hope of seeing a directed, “complete development” of each and every figure, and acknowledged instead, I believe, new kinds of differences within and among different depicted figures, including transitions that seem, as we saw in the figure of the mother, unduly prolonged and mutable in nature.

4 Atmospheric effects flock to dissipate the solidity of the horse, especially through the interrelation of sky, vapor, and mane. Little about this figure seems connected to the violence and suffering that dominate elsewhere. This exemption from depicted violence was registered at the time as really rather odd—several critics made wry comments about a free-floating horse lacking any weight. By contrast, they did not see the mother at all: it’s as if she was clearly excused from the conditions of suffering in the Chios. Contemporaries could not resolve the question of her inner life by means of her expression alone; I suggested that this was because the paint handling Delacroix used to depict the mother blurs in some places while tightening in others. Where are

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the traces of either mode in the kind of facture that became characteristically identified with Delacroix’s gifts as a born painter? Even asking this question offers potential for elaboration beyond two cardinal trends, long established in analyses of Delacroix’s facture: first, drawing out implications specific to the work in hand, and only the work in hand; and second, collecting together observations on different parts of works from different decades. For example, in 1834, the Women of Algiers gave Delacroix one of his most successful critical receptions at the Salon; it is a painting that contains a complex density of patterning (see fig. 6). As we saw, Signac was able to excise areas from it as examples of the parceled-up “short strokes” he identified as precursors to Neo-Impressionism (see fig. 8). In fact, effects of patterning, beading, and so on seemed to have eventually provided Delacroix with sources of factural interest more enduring than the extremes of jagged and atmospheric interchanges he explored in the Chios. Jack Spector has noted the subtle unifying play of the depicted pearls scattered across the picture plane of the Sardanapalus. This echoes nineteenth-century evocations of Delacroix’s facture: Maxime Du Camp and Auguste Jal likened Delacroix’s talent to the skills of a “master jeweler.”26 For Louis Vitet, bursts of details in paintings such as the Sardanapalus dazzled, although Vitet objected that they did not yield intelligibility to the eye.27 Signac’s partisan polemics forbade him to think too much about the historical impossibility of vaulting from a cushion’s corner in the Algiers to a patch of sun-struck grass as portrayed by Monet: both were considered productions of an explorative brush prior to the schooling and regulation Neo-Impressionism imposed on the hand. We might say that the problem for Signac, and even for commentators not so obviously under the sway of Impressionism’s ocular regime, was that, to put it bluntly, Delacroix’s brushstrokes don’t need the outdoors. Changing conditions of light aren’t indispensable to their effects. Indeed, deep connections obtain between Delacroix’s facture in the period from 1824 to 1827 and English painting of same period. In addition to the well-known technical innovations he availed himself of in the adamantly landscape-based idioms of John Constable and Richard Parkes Bonington, Delacroix admired painters such as David Wilkie, who specialized in historical genre painting.28 At the same time, conclusions about Delacroix’s facture in specific relation to these sources have proved difficult to articulate. Moreover, a continuing commitment on his part to depicting the figure ensures that Delacroix’s painting intersects with a number of powerful theoretical frameworks. The differing historical readings of Fried, Crary, Rosalind Krauss, and Carol Armstrong, among others, have identified a divisive and fraught passage from a corporeal to an ocular paradigm in mid- to

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late nineteenth-century French art.29 And yet, as we have seen, Delacroix’s painting has so far escaped explanation in these contexts. Signac couldn’t identify effects of light as a source for the choppy curls of bright color and other effects applied by Delacroix to his canvases. Such opacity is contrary to the prized Neo-Impressionist ability to evaporate, as Martha Ward has pointed out, the “physical properties of the couleur matière” in the “mélange optique.”30 Not that this stopped Signac. Actually, he enjoyed describing parts of paintings made much earlier in the nineteenth century. Note, however, the kind of vocabulary he used. For example, we have seen him use the evocative term “sinister glitter” to conjure certain brushstrokes in Delacroix’s Shipwreck of Don Juan (1841; see figs. 9, 10). Signac was referring to a portrayal of turbulent water, something he could conceivably have described in terms of atmospheric texture and color. But left that path untrodden. He didn’t pin down his response; he preferred instead to open up his description: after all, outside of Symbolist poetics, and in the context of Delacroix’s painting, what could “sinister glitter” mean? Signac, I suggest, didn’t want to defeat or extinguish an experience of the very kind of delay the extremes of which we have seen Delacroix restlessly exploring 16 years earlier in the Chios. In addition—and this I believe is key to understanding how enthusiastically Signac and like-minded commentators could describe the paintings of a “master jeweler”—decades of exposure to Impressionist painting had ensured Signac’s familiarity with a mechanism of lag or delay. If the painter wasn’t an academic realist, intent on delivering an illusionistic rendition of the chosen scene, then he was doing his best, by his energetic exertion of the brush, to fix his sensation of the scene as it looked to him in that moment. The painter’s eye was privileged as the guarantor of the genuine effort that was registered by the vitality of brushwork and color. Although a gap must of necessity obtain between the freshness of the motif in the first place and the freshness of painterly effect summoned to render it, the viewer was assured that the painter had patently done his best, in a way that had never before been left so authentically—sketchily—intact on canvas. Nonetheless, effects of delay in Delacroix’s painting escaped descriptive capture even by a commentator versed in delay figured as performative. (The theme of delay can be expanded, I think, into a nuanced lexicon, including concepts of migration and porosity: I pursue this in Appendix 2.)

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5 An attempt to detect the persistence—or abandonment—of the two extremes of handling in the Chios’s spectrum of effects could begin with a consideration of a particular detail from the Death of Sardanapalus (see fig. 3). This painting arrived in the Salon (to a notoriously stormy reception) almost four years after the exhibition of the Chios.31 A flow of red issues where a sword is plunged into the horse in the Sardanapalus (fig. 51). Most of its body is cut off by the frame, so that we see “half a horse,” as a sarcastic Vitet put it at the time. We don’t see any blood however; an abundant flowing tassel is its replacement. This tassel is the detail in question: it streams into a collection of braids and is echoed by a smaller pattern of braids in the horse’s bridle.32 If we return to the head of the horse portrayed in the Chios, we may note a passage in which painted textures suggesting foam gather at the side of the horse’s mouth (fig. 52). In a portrayal lacking several signifiers of equine energy, Delacroix left this traditional locus of physical exertion intact.33 Moreover, the truncating corner in the Sardanapalus, which dispenses even with the insubstantial, dispersed signifiers of the Chios—a horse’s belly and rump—indicates a resolve to concentrate attention on the head, neck, and front of the horse. The variegated brushstrokes at the horse’s mouth in the Chios shade very subtly and tentatively—but nonetheless they do shade—into a cluster of tassels, bridles, and reins. And then the intricate tributaries of the muscles and veins in the horse’s head fan out around the nostrils and mouth. The displacement of the horse’s tassel in the Sardanapalus is an exchange between the animate and inanimate. This is what I believe is glimpsed in nascent form around the mouth of the horse in the Chios. Spector considers the tassel portrayed in the Sardanapalus to be a singular invention—the boldness of making so much red where another kind of red is supposed to flow. Considered as a conceit, it is the kind of flourish amenable to a generalized appreciation of Delacroix’s mastery of paint. At this chapter’s beginning I noted that diffuse though it may be, this generalized response is in no danger of retreating even in the face of renewed vitality in the scholarship on Delacroix. Over the course of this chapter, I have examined only a limited number of passages of paint; a paltry amount considering the much more comprehensive kind of inquiry that remains to be done. But at least I’ve shown that it is impossible to chalk up the curious placement of the tassel depicted in the Sardanapalus to the vagaries of an isolated invention—indeed nothing looks more characteristic of the factural means Delacroix deployed in Chios than a partial strategy pursued in respect to a figure we can’t see in its entirety.

51 Eugène Delacroix Death of Sardanapalus a detail of horse being stabbed

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52 Eugène Delacroix Chios, detail of foam gathering at the side of the horse’s mouth

The tassel’s abundance proves impossible to appreciate without connecting it to a sequence of passages in other paintings, ones made both before and after the Sardanapalus. Which is why one intriguing detail in the Sardanapalus—and here I draw together some final observations about the importance of effects of delay in Delacroix’s painting—might offer a helpful outline of how any future, more thoroughgoing inquiry into Delacroix’s facture might proceed. Neither the tassel nor any other part of the Sardanapalus offers a whit of connection to depicted dispersals of light or air that occupy such a large part of the earlier painting. But as we saw, the interaction of horse and background in the Chios is simultaneously at its oddest and most powerful when it comes to the skyline, resulting in the disappearances Thiers and other viewers sarcastically noted at the time. Moreover, the ability of the depicted tassel to stand in for corporeal puncture reminds us that the contrasts jammed into the inch-by-inch application of paint constituting the mother portrayed in the Chios’s also

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function metonymically. Viewers in 1824—some drawn to this figure before all others—were left wondering whether she was supposed to look alive or dead. Any future exploration of Delacroix’s painting should, I believe, take into account the potential of the Chios’s facture to prolong effects of delay, which, for contemporaries at least, were experienced as resonant indeed, because suffering and violence were seen to afflict most of its figures—none more so, we can now say, than in the mother. In fact, it was she who weighed on Picasso’s mind, according to T.J. Clark, as the gravity-laden foreground essential to Guernica’s new “version of closeness” proceeded haltingly into anchored clarity.34 By the same token, future discussions might explore the fact that the intriguing displacement of injury in the Sardanapalus does not needle the viewer into unsettled awareness of a state evoking ongoing pain. Effects of delay are tied to a depiction of the inert and the extraneous, located in detailing and decoration. And this reminds us in turn that Jal and Du Camp shared an impulse to describe Delacroix’s characteristic approach to painting as that of a “master jeweler.” Just four years after the Chios, Delacroix blotted out any hint of its thinly painted sky and buried the Sardanapalus’s horse in a closely packed density of foreground pictorial incident—extinguishing the effect of protracted suffering that had opened in areas of the Chios. Notions like Delacroix as a “master jeweler” are best considered, I believe, with an awareness that the long years in which he kept painting include a vast array of changes that await more specific accounts. More on this in the Envoi.

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Chapter 4 The Lost Romantic

While Delacroix endures as the main representative of the nouvelle école which emerged at the 1824 Salon, its most successful painting was not in fact the Chios but a work by the now-obscure artist Xavier Sigalon. Based on an episode in Jean Racine’s play Britannicus (1669), Sigalon’s picture has the following long title: Locusta, Giving to Narcissus a Poison Destined for Britannicus, Tests it on a Young Slave (fig. 53). Thiers summed up the acclaim that greeted the Locusta: “There is one painting at the Salon on which everyone agrees, whose great merit is recognized.”1 Even in references to the 1824 Salon, where Sigalon is mentioned in the same breath as Delacroix, scholars fall silent on Sigalon’s effective exit from a Salon career after the Locusta’s dazzling success.2 Delacroix’s career was lengthy and productive, but the critical fiasco of Sigalon’s follow-up to the Locusta—his Athalia Massacring Her Children, exhibited at the “Salon of 1827”—was an event from which Sigalon never quite recovered (figs. 54 and 60).

1 Why does a book devoted to Delacroix require a chapter explaining the meteoric rise and precipitous fall of a now-almost-forgotten artist? Dusting off an unfairly neglected lesser name is not my intention: such an approach would fail to readjust the value system that excluded artists like Sigalon in the first place, and the pitfalls of such approaches have been made well known.3 A complete account of Delacroix’s painting needs to address a problem so far untouched by any researcher: why did Delacroix follow directions in his painting not only different from but completely opposed to those taken by the Salon’s most well-received painter? Why do we find him veering so far away from artistic preferences that contemporary critics found so appealing? This chapter offers answers to both questions. Although the Locusta has remained an art-historical understudy to the Chios, and Sigalon a passing shadow of Delacroix, critics of the 1824 Salon flocked to the Locusta. The Chios offered discomfiture at best. Those responses were so divergent, I believe, because the two paintings treat temporality in

53 Xavier Sigalon Locusta, Giving to Narcissus a Poison Destined for Britannicus, Tests It On a Young Slave, 1824 Oil on canvas 7 ft. 4 in. × 9 ft. 7 in. M U S ÉE D ES B E A UX - A RT S , N Î M E S

54 Xavier Sigalon Athalia Massacring the Children of Ochozias, 1827 Oil on canvas 14 ft. 4 in. × 20 ft. M U S ÉE D ES B E A UX - A RT S , N A N T E S .

55 Xavier Sigalon Locusta, detail of Locusta

completely different ways. The moment depicted in the Locusta is not only brief, it is highly contracted, and the Locusta’s success depended on its remarkable temporal contraction—the painting’s unique choice of moment. Sigalon depicts a poisoning, but it is also a rehearsal, and a test for a future event using substitution: a highly unusual and, as I will show, ingenious thematic which has passed entirely without notice in the scholarship. How many paintings evoke the effects of poison?4 Locusta is an expert poisoner who has been instructed to concoct a mixture that will kill Britannicus, Nero’s brother and rival for power, as quickly as possible. Narcissus, depicted seated in the painting’s left foreground, is a servant of Nero, there to witness the successful test of the draught. Leaning towards Narcissus, the Locusta gestures toward herself with her right hand (this hand also clutches the vial of poison) and stretches out her left arm to point to the stricken slave (fig. 55). In fact, the sweep of her left arm takes in the extent of the slave’s body: the figure of Narcissus is wedged into a comparatively narrow slice of the composition, the better to afford Locusta the breadth her gesture demands. The object of the dramatic gesture is the slave who falls as the poison courses though his body. The poison in question could not work any faster: its speed is crucial to the

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painting’s effect. The lines from Racine quoted in the Salon livret say that “the sword is slower” than Locusta’s poison “to cut short a life.”5 Critics noted the speed of the moment. For example, Auguste Chauvin specified in his description of the painting that the slave has just been thrown to the ground and that the thud of the slave’s collapse startled the nocturnal haunt into alarmed activity in ways that enhanced the scene’s furtive character. “At [the slave’s] fall,” said Chauvin, “a snake slips into the brambles; an owl takes flight, letting out a funereal cry, and the sky darkens.”6

2 Before delving further into how Sigalon achieved these electrifying temporal effects in the Locusta, we need to appreciate why this extreme moment—so radically abbreviated, so wildly animated—received such a warm welcome in 1824. In fact, we already have the tools for this appreciation in the contrast between the Locusta and the Salon entries of painters like Abel de Pujol and Michel-Martin Drolling, trained in the studio of David. As we saw in Chapter 2, critics of every stripe, whether supposedly progressive or conservative, were immensely critical of Abel de Pujol in particular—and his ill-advised recourse to David’s Leonidas—with no reviewer more devastatingly negative than Delécluze. Stendhal, in particular, was infuriated by the insufferable slackness of the many figures Abel de Pujol had painted, all availing of a desultory, open-ended temporality.7 Stendhal blamed such exasperating ease on one of the paintings Delécluze had seen take shape in David’s studio: The Intervention of the Sabine Women (see fig. 29). The figure of Romulus seen in profile in the right foreground earned Stendhal’s particular contempt. Instead of being gripped by the passion of the moment, Stendhal saw a figure composed of preening gestures. “This man battles for his life and his throne,” Stendhal pointed out in his “Salon of 1824,” yet “all he can think of is how best to cut a figure, to show us his fine muscles and display how gracefully he throws a spear.”8 But in voicing these objections, Stendhal was not simply rejecting David. Note how exact are Stendhal’s criticisms: they are aimed at the dearth of feeling and expression in the paintings of the contemporary Davidians, and he identified these faults as inherited from the figures in David’s Sabines. Stendhal’s criticism is infused by a relation to the Davidian tradition that is at once highly specific and mediated. He adored the Locusta for reasons, I believe, that had everything to do with David’s history paintings from the 1780s. Clearly, then, in 1824 the Locusta offered a bracing antidote to paintings like the populous, monotonous Germanicus. The Locusta conveyed a heightened

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degree of animation, a sharpened mode of expression, and strong, oppositional contrasts (including chiaroscuro) concentrated among a small, closely bound set of figures. A terse grouping of figures, structured by the taut contrasts Stendhal applauded, is also found in other nouvelle école paintings shown in the 1824 Salon. We see but two main figures (Cardinal Winchester interrogating St Joan) in Paul Delaroche’s Joan of Arc in Prison (1824; fig. 56). Delaroche’s use

56 Paul Delaroche Joan of Arc in Prison, 1824 Oil on canvas 9 ft. × 7 ft. MUSÉE D ES BEAU X-ARTS, ROU EN

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57 Jacques-Louis David Oath of the Horatii, 1785 Oil on canvas 10 ft. 9 in. × 13 ft. 11 in. PAR I S , M U S É E DU L O UV R E

of a “sharp contrast between interrogator and victim” in this painting has been emphasized by Bann.9 We have already seen the laconic grouping preferred by Cogniet for his Massacre of the Innocents, with its focus on just one figure, the mother clutching her baby (see fig. 21). It’s hardly a stretch to see Davidian structures in these paintings. Oppositional contrasts among small, closely bound groups of figures received their canonical expression in David’s history paintings of the 1780s, epitomized in 1785 in the Oath of the Horatii’s unified moment of highly dramatic action (fig. 57).10 But the Locusta remains the nouvelle école work that received the greatest critical acclaim: none of the other paintings was seen to equal its precise temporal effects. And those effects have above all to do with Sigalon’s decision to depict the slave in the grip of convulsions, perhaps the most unusual and extreme aspect of the Locusta’s subject matter. At the time, everyone who took note of the Locusta remarked upon the slave’s condition: even a pamphlet listing State purchases from the “Salon of 1824” emphasized the convulsions.11 Thiers seemed to have almost heard the slave’s anguished spasms. “The slave,” said Thiers, “thrown down, writhes in on himself, beating his feet on the ground.”12 There are three aspects, I think, to Sigalon’s unusual concentration on this kind of bodily state. First, the notion of convulsions conveys an extremely

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58 Xavier Sigalon Locusta, detail of the slave

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high degree of pain. The slave’s suffering could not be more deeply inscribed: it is dreadful. Thiers commented that “the slave gives signs of the most violent suffering.”13 But the pain is of a particular kind: it is immediate, acute, and vivid. Convulsions lend a specific temporal character to the evocation of suffering. Chauvin and Thiers imagined that they could almost hear the thud of the slave’s collapse at the very instant the paroxysms began. Chauvin said that the ground shook “at his fall,” while Thiers described him as “thrown down,” doubled up with pain, “beating his feet on the ground.”14 The painting thus brilliantly conveys the instantaneous shock: the moment when the slave falls marks the onset of the convulsions.15 Second, there is the sheer brevity of the moment. Chauvin said that the “obedient victim expires and rolls around on the ground where his violent pains have just thrown him” and that the “unfortunate boy brings faltering hands to his sides”16 (fig. 58). Thiers remarked that the slave seemed to be “tearing at his sides” and that he “writhes in on himself.”17 Here, these critics also emphasized the hands of the slave, which reinforce the effect of his body gripped by spasms: his right hand clutches at his stomach while the other hand is a clenched fist. Chauvin says both that the slave has “just” been thrown to the ground and that his hands are already “faltering.” The beginning of his convulsions are already the figure’s death-throes. The viewer is alerted to the onset of suffering, but is almost simultaneously assured that the suffering is nearly over. The convulsions make the moment extraordinarily brief. A fierce and violent pain is conveyed, but it is a convulsive, spasmodic state, a seizure about to end, and in this way the depiction of convulsions produces an effect that is instantaneous and intense, but also inoculating. Third, and most important, the slave’s convulsions are the results of a poison—an outside agency. The moment the convulsions start is the moment the poison invades and colonizes the slave’s body. Thiers described the exact moment of occupation: “a fatal drink” had “just been poured into the slave’s breast” by Locusta.18 And once we acknowledge the central role Sigalon allocated to poison in the scene, we are in a position to take the full measure of his ingenuity in the Locusta. Because the slave is dying of a poison, his convulsions convey total submission to a force outside of himself, “poured into his breast.” The slave is depicted literally in the grip of the poison: the convulsions signal the poison’s dominion over his body. Thus the slave is suffering a seizure in the fullest sense of that word. In this case, convulsions are the body’s desperate and reflexive reaction to a foreign element. Caused by such a powerful outside agency, these contractions, involuntary and brutal, pitilessly reduce the slave’s personality and history. The

paroxysms rob his body of its expressive capacity: the body’s own repertoire of reflexive gestures and actions is all that remains. Consider, then, given all of this, that the slave is entirely anonymous to begin with: he is a test case, a cipher. The convulsions have no character, no persona to work against; there is no expressive capacity to reduce. Any inner dimension to his character is extinguished, all the better for the poison to course through his body. Utterly porous to the toxin that constitutes him as a subject, the “empty” body of the slave is a brilliant conceit. He is just a body, a host for the poison. His figure is entirely constituted by the poison’s action— the action in the painting—which is dazzlingly, transparently immediate. It is perhaps the slave’s eyes, rolled back so much that only the whites are visible, that most communicate his “empty” figure (fig. 59). Hence there is an evacuation of meaning, a desisting from any attempt to explore subjectivity. But there is also the attainment of a perfect, if astoundingly empty, match of inner and outer states. It is a scene full to the brim and yet void. Delécluze deplored the Locusta, seeing in it only “exterior forms.”19 It is in this match above all that we find the deep reason for the Locusta’s success and why it seemed to effectively depict a unified action in the terms of the disabled Davidian tradition. By so entirely delivering the body of the slave and the temporality and action of the scene over to the poison, Sigalon offered an exceptional means, a new and bizarre kind of agency, for uniting figures in one frozen moment. The scene echoes, or rather mimes (since there is no “inside” to the action), the Horatii’s synchronicity of inner and outer states.20 An action could in fact be depicted because it was not an action at all but only its most elaborate facsimile: an action delivered over to a uniquely plausible, uniquely shallow, thematic of poison. As we have seen, the other paintings of the nouvelle école are also characterized by a general return to the principles of oppositional contrast typical of David’s paintings of the 1780s, but the Locusta’s effect stood out. It was the Locusta’s success that Thiers proclaimed as the one thing in the Salon on which everyone was agreed. The strategies I have been exploring—the poison’s convulsive force, its instantaneity, its new and bizarre variety of agency— explain the consensus. Sigalon did not try to isolate or appropriate particular figures or elements from the 1780s (other painters made that mistake21): he was driven by the urge to regain the essential unity of the classically successful oppositional schema in its entirety—so much so that he was obliged to drain its potential for meaning in a tenacious effort to hold onto the all-consuming, bound-up moment. Delécluze saw that the force of the painting lay in its wholeness and immediacy of temporal effect, which he found “disagreeable”.

59 Xavier Sigalon Locusta, detail of the slave’s face

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But what he hated was that there seemed to him nothing beyond, nothing to modulate the strength of his “initial impression”: he “searched” fruitlessly to see if his “spirit and soul” could “find at least something,” a yield of meaning, but found that he was left with the entirety and force of his initial impression, and that “everything [about it] withers my soul.”22 Bann has discussed how Delaroche’s engagement with David’s paintings of the 1780s was concentrated on spatial, scenographic means, indicating a similar acknowledgment that any attempt to return to the classic unified moment could not reassemble it from parts, but had to approach it intact, as a whole.23

3 It seems to me this analysis of the Locusta effectively solves the problem of the mystifying trajectory of Sigalon’s career; at least I hope I have put paid to the tendency to mention Sigalon in the same breath as Delacroix in relation to the 1824 Salon, only to fall silent on why Sigalon effectively vanished from the Salon arena after 1827. To be sure, Sigalon’s paintings do share an important characteristic with Delacroix’s: in 1824 and 1827 both painters submitted Salon entries depicting scenes of extreme affect, and conjuring violence, suffering, and death. And as noted in Chapter 1, it is by now a truism that these features are eminently Romantic, reflecting these painters’ interest in evoking the most wrenching, moving, and heightened kinds of human action. Nonetheless, Sigalon found himself unable to sustain the strategies arrayed in the most successful painting of his career. In 1824, the Locusta’s mise en scène achieved a swollen assurance of effect and the impression of unified action at the expense of meaning. In the Locusta, there is the emptying-out of any extended opportunity for imaginative inquiry into inner states. By contrast, the Chios is all uncertain future and ambiguous past, evoking protracted, corporeal suffering: for the contemporaneous critics its affective states took a perplexing hiatus from determinacy. It is telling that Sigalon chose to follow the Locusta with a very different kind of painting, indicating he found this earlier painting’s central conceit unrepeatable. The Athalia is a complicated, multi-figure composition (see fig. 60). It was berated by the critics of the 1827 Salon for what they saw as its hectic, teeming composition: one of these critics, Charles Farcy, called it an “ambitious fracas.”24 Not a single one of the Locusta’s effects, it turned out, could be repeated once it had been used in the Locusta.

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60 Xavier Sigalon Athalia Massacring the Children of Ochozias, 1827 Oil on canvas 14 ft. 4 in. × 20 ft. MUSÉ E D ES BEAU X-ARTS, NANTES.

Chapter 5 Stendhal’s Art Criticism Reconsidered In the previous chapter we found Stendhal vitriolic in his criticism of the Sabines and paintings by the contemporary Davidians. Yet he was compelled by the dramatic charge of paintings that conformed in important respects to a vital period in David’s career. This submerged admiration ties the Davidian tradition’s most famous critical adversary in the 1820s to the object of his attacks. Can I argue that we should adjust still further our ideas of Stendhal’s opinions? His dislike of Delacroix’s painting, mentioned in Chapters 2 and 3, has long seemed at odds with the view of his art criticism as progressive; his role in the cultural debates of the 1820s seems to confirm this view.1 And the unanimities that used to be ascribed to these debates—not least the unchanging note of Delécluze’s opposition to Delacroix—have already disappeared from view. In this chapter I will not downplay the strength of Stendhal’s aversion to the Chios: I will offer a context for its appreciation, which can lead us back to the Chios with a sharpened sense of its refusals of drama and instantaneity. Stendhal’s categorical insistence on particular kinds of temporality is especially important to my argument: he wanted to see drama unfold sequentially in all cases, and we’ve already glimpsed the short shrift he gave the Chios (that impatient dismissal of Delacroix’s “animated corpses”). Stendhal took variations on fatiguing ambiguity to be intrinsic to the Chios, and they prompted him to beat an exasperated retreat from Delacroix’s painting. The Chios didn’t stand a chance, because what Stendhal wanted to see in a painting was drama that convinced him nothing about it was random or rootless. This tallies with our previous encounters with Stendhal’s preferences: he relished the Locusta’s lucid composition, staked out in terms of strong oppositional contrasts, and he especially appreciated Sigalon’s penchant for dramatic chiaroscuro.2

1 The context I offer in this chapter includes Stendhal’s “Salon of 1824” and the formidable History of Painting in Italy (1817). These writings haven’t often been considered in relation to Stendhal’s better-known analyses of French

61 Masaccio (Tommaso di Ser Giovanni di Simone) Baptism of the Neophytes by Saint Peter, 1427 Oil on canvas 8 ft. 4 in. × 5 ft. 4 in. F R ES CO . BR A N C A C C I C H A PE L , S A N TA M A R I A DE L CAR M I N E, FL O R E N C E

theater, especially his polemical tract, Racine and Shakespeare (1823–1824). Yet Stendhal declares (in the History) that the dramatic imagination and the painterly imagination are one and the same.3 In fact, the History has escaped repeated or thorough inquiry. It’s even suffered from a dismissive attitude— scholars haven’t found much to tempt them in its jumpy, often very short chapters and apparently unconnected musings. Neither has the History been investigated for the roots it contains of ideas brought to fruition—or so I argue—in Stendhal’s later but better-known commentaries of the early 1820s. Such considerations will emerge in due course; first we need to hear Stendhal’s distinctive voice. A prominent target in Racine and Shakespeare is the recommendation inherited from Racine about the number of hours that should be covered by the events portrayed in a tragedy: 36 at the most. Racine believed the seventeenth-century French stage was mired in lackadaisical narratives that squandered dramatic momentum in temporal wanderings.4 As far as Stendhal was concerned, this reformist zeal should have been left in the seventeenth century. Racine’s rule was too confining; his disciplinary action was no longer necessary. Moreover, portrayals of momentous events passing in a hasty cavalcade could hardly be described as plausible. I quote from Racine and Shakespeare: Racinian tragedy can never use more than the thirty-six hours of an action; hence there is never any development of the passions. What plot has the time to be hatched, or what movement of the people can develop, in thirtysix hours? It is interesting, it is beautiful, to see Othello, so much in love in the first act, kill his wife in the fifth. If this change were to take place in thirty-six hours, it would be absurd, and I would have only contempt for Othello.5 As has often been observed, comments of this kind in Racine and Shakespeare reflect Stendhal’s eagerness to discard creaky conventions, especially retrograde Racinian ones, rather than pursue ideas for future innovation.6 Most scholars have not noted the fact that almost all of the major events portrayed in Othello fall within a “relentless course [of] some thirty-six hours,” to quote John Golder.7 Moreover, Stendhal’s choice was the Shakespearean tragedy with the longest tradition of performance in France, a popularity no doubt linked to audience familiarity with such breathless pacing.8 Nonetheless, Stendhal blithely stated that an appropriately long period of time underwrites Othello’s change of heart. Quibbling about numbers of hours mattered little to Stendhal when the play in question was sufficiently transporting.

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Stendhal was especially taken by dramatic effects signaling an obvious change of heart, whether portrayed on the stage or in a painting. (No wonder he turned on his heel in front of the Chios; it presented him with absolutely no point of obvious ingress.) And he pined, in a sometimes confused manner, for such moments to appear packed with evidence. What kind of evidence? The evidence sought by Stendhal could amount to an entire life history, one that had to appear specific to the character in question. It also had to exemplify that sequential, unfolding logic he liked so much— a logic that echoes the increasingly strict criteria of the mid- to late eighteenth-century discourses on theater and painting. An early example is the Earl of Shaftesbury’s rigorous warning that the artist is “debarred” from depicting anything not of the utmost pertinence to the “single Instant” and yet must still retain the “footfall” of the past in the depicted moment of unified action.9 Drawing on Shaftesbury (Anthony Ashley-Cooper, Third Earl of Shaftesbury), Jacob Grimm, and Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, certain texts of Diderot—his “Salons” and his writings on theater—brought these requirements to a new pitch of intensity. They epitomize the strength of the anti-Rococo reaction: immediate measures had to be taken to arrest the despicably lowly ambition of François Boucher and his ilk. Stendhal’s divergence from this tradition will become relevant in due course. At this point, the extent of his delighted response to a question heard well into the progress of Racine’s Andromache (1667) is of greatest importance. In Racine and Shakespeare, just 20 or so pages before he submits Racine’s 36-hour time frame to a wafer-thin critique, Stendhal defines what he calls the “moments of complete illusion” that occur over the course of a tragedy. According to Stendhal, they abound more “in the tragedies of Shakespeare than in the tragedies of Racine.”10 Which means we shouldn’t be at all surprised to find him locating his leading example in Andromache. Here is Stendhal’s description of the question he liked so much: These delicious and very rare instants of complete illusion [original emphasis] are encountered only in the warmth of a lively scene when there is a rapid exchange of lines among the actors. For example, when Hermione says to Orestes, who has just assassinated Pyrrhus by her order: “Who told you to do so?” One will never encounter these moments of complete illusion at the instant when a murder is committed on the stage or when the guards come to arrest a character and take him to prison. We cannot believe any of these things

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to be real, and they never produce an illusion. These bits are written only to introduce the scenes in which the spectators experience those half-seconds that are so delicious.11 Hermione’s character capsizes in the “warmth of a lively scene” following “the instant when a murder is committed.” Stendhal’s caution about implausibly short periods of portrayed time is once again thrown to the winds. What Stendhal finds transporting is the fact that Hermione’s question comes as a complete surprise to the grim-faced Orestes reporting on the murder of Pyrrhus at his wedding altar. Hermione herself gave him his orders (and “one short hour ago” at that). Hermione then berates Orestes for ever believing the earlier version of her character, consumed by thoughts of revenge. In asking what initially appeared to Orestes as a disorientated question, Hermione was renouncing this “frantic” self. Stendhal’s praise of Hermione’s abrupt query leads us back to his appreciation of Sigalon’s Locusta (see fig. 53). Unlike most other critics of the time, for whom the suffering slave was the primary focus of Sigalon’s painting, Stendhal devotes most of his attention to the figure of the poisoner Locusta and her out-flung arm. His responses—on the one hand, to Hermione’s question, and on the other, to Locusta’s gesture—share important qualities. Stendhal sets aside a considerable chunk of his “Salon of 1824” to an elaborate explanation of Locusta’s gesture—an argument which has received no scholarly attention until now. Stendhal had heard an unfair criticism of his favorite contemporary painting and rushed to Sigalon’s defense. An anonymous commentator (Stendhal doesn’t identify names or sources) had grumbled that Locusta’s arm, pointing so emphatically at the collapsed slave, looked implausibly “wild.” Stendhal starts off by conceding that this is an excellent point. “It is incontestable,” he says, “that a person long hardened in crime does not make wild gestures at the sight of something as simple as a slave being put to death.” “In Rome,” he continues, “under the emperors and before the triumph of Christianity, putting a slave to death was the same as when we in the Paris of today put down a mongrel because its barking disturbs us.”12 Locusta’s character, according to Stendhal, is shaped by the brutal historical environment in which she has long honed her dubious skills. Hence the efficacy with which marks of age and traces of experience evoked the nature of crime as a state. Sigalon’s emphasis on Locusta’s age (as Stendhal sees it) fortifies the scene’s overall persuasiveness. Sigalon’s commendable portrayal of a supposedly “hideous and half-naked body” reflects the unfortunate condition of “Locusta’s soul.” As this Locusta grew more and more inured to venality, she

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graduated from one stage of “excess” to the next: “from debauchery’s excess to crime’s excess.” Here we see Stendhal conceding to the objection that Sigalon’s poisoner should look inured to the act of violence that dominates the scene he painted. She shouldn’t have batted an eyelid at the “simple” act of violence before her. To which Stendhal’s response seems to have been: where’s the drama in that? Stendhal predicts that “Sigalon will perhaps be a great painter.” Had he not given Locusta her “wild” gesture, his painting would have been “an estimable piece of work just like the hundred other paintings with which cold-hearted men have decked the Salon” and in front of which hardly “ten viewers stop.”13 (It is at this point that we can return to the strength of the anti-Rococo discourses described by Fried, and their inauguration of a Diderotian tradition in French art criticism. The tradition of French painting at its best came to be associated with the autonomy of the individual canvas, invariably destined for a public space.14 By the 1760s, the work of Boucher—an artist who thought nothing of allowing the stylistic traits of his painting to flow past the singular canvas and onto a variety of surfaces—was seen to erode this integrity. To fight off the threat of extinction, painting closed ranks and marked off its development as purely a history of painting. The specificity of theatricality goads this rigorous development—painting knows its enemy and does not flail against a vague or generic extra-aesthetic. Therefore, as time went on, French painting needed to produce ever stronger proofs of persuasive anti-theatricality. Although Stendhal may seem as captivated as was Diderot, according to Fried, by paintings where a persuasiveness of depicted action reigns, these responses are not repetitions of one another. The complexity of justification found in Stendhal’s defense of Locusta’s gesture is seen to conform, then, to an historical problematic.) In returning to Stendhal’s defense of Sigalon’s painting with this context in mind, we find ourselves unable to say that a simple exception was made for Locusta’s gesture springing out of character on the grounds that it is dramatic. Diderot’s stringent criteria in respect to convincing character portrayal in both drama and painting includes a demand that depicted actions run straight as a die to palpable causes. As Stendhal’s discussion unfolds, it is this rigor of criteria that becomes evident. Stendhal stays the course to explain the cause of Locusta’s gesture deep within her character: “[s]he is committing the crime, but if I can put it like this, her soul feels the repercussion of it; it is that in former times she had a heart susceptible to noble and tender emotions.”15 According to Stendhal, although Locusta’s gesture, just like Hermione’s question, is vivid, it is neither exceptional nor excessive. Like the identification Orestes is abruptly asked to provide, its initial unexpectedness is a thrilling, momentary

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impression. That is because both actions, according to Stendhal, are unbidden by the part of their characters responsible for acts of appalling violence perpetrated at their behest virtually moments before. Yet the ferocity of these terrible events secured the effect of transport Stendhal longed for: achieved in his beloved “moment[s] of complete illusion.” For Stendhal, then, the jolt of Locusta’s gesture comes not out of character, but issues from an earlier stage in her life, before the accretion of wrongdoing (she was “once” like this). Her gesture harks back to a younger, more clement version of herself. It appears unbidden by that long-hardened part of herself, the part that was ordered to poison a slave. Instead, it is awakened by the depicted moment, underlining the scene’s horror and extremity and emphasizing the immersion in crime that has brought her character to its current pass. Vestiges of a milder Locusta linger yet, the gesture says: a revelation dramatic to the core since this residue would have remained dormant and unsuspected had it not been awakened by the scene’s extremity. Stendhal saw, therefore, a depicted gesture that ran straight to a palpable, if deeply rooted cause. If this perception seems seem eminently in line with the Diderotian tradition as described by Fried, it stands to reason that specific precedents for it can be readily found in Diderot’s “Salon”s. Why have I suggested, then, that Stendhal’s response to Sigalon’s painting, as concentrated on the gesture of one of its figures, diverges in essence from Diderot? The main reason is the weight of explanation and interest we see Stendhal pile onto the putative course of a portrayed character’s life, perceived to unfold according to different, discrete phases (evidence of this impulse from the History will become relevant in due course). In his enthusiasm both for Hermione’s question and Locusta’s gesture, Stendhal’s look toward the future is rounded out by projections about the past. The confidence behind such enthusiasm is, I believe, well illustrated by Stendhal’s praise for the Locusta’s unusual theme of rehearsal. In Sigalon’s painting, Stendhal found a trio far removed from the oddly lulled and strangely suspended states in which the Chios’s figures seemed ensnared. Instead, Sigalon obligingly gave him an array of proleptic effects—rehearsal, testing, and substitution. Stendhal took these as cast-iron assurances of consequences: “Under the slave’s face,” he said approvingly, “it is the noble Britannicus that we see expire.”16 He doesn’t mention the possibility of changes to or variations in the next enactment; participants in Stendhal’s idea of a rehearsal both stand in for and host the next set of figures. Could therebe more emphatic ways to build guarantees of the future into the present, more definite means to assure the viewer of a trustworthy sequence and of the very next event? The Locusta offered Stendhal an overdetermined set of assured consequences—its narrative, its gestures, its compressed

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temporality, and even its theme of substitution and testing work—to create a closed causal sequence. In particular, Sigalon’s depiction of Locusta as aged appeared to him especially successful: it was not the portrayal of age per se that appealed to Stendhal, but rather how age translated Locusta’s profession. As Stendhal saw it, a repertoire of signifiers can be read in the figure of Locusta: malice nursed over time; longstanding, ill-used skill; and a knowledge of iniquity. We have seen how enthusiastically Stendhal scouted back in time to locate a period before the establishment of the later, desensitized version of the character he attributed to Locusta. The period he hunted for was one when a very young Locusta still attached meaning to words. Stendhal specified a period in which this Locusta still felt “tender emotions.” This earlier version of her character was, according to Stendhal, automatically a better version.

2 Stendhal’s attention to potentially transformative change through life, as youth is left behind—and not for the better—should stand in comparison to Diderot’s commentary in his “Salon of 1767” on the transition from childhood to adulthood.17 The regrettable de-sensitization we’ve observed Stendhal register is revealed when a character is startled out of a state that has become customary. Diderot muses instead on how unguarded our emotions necessarily are during childhood, because of the tumultuous process by which we learn language. “[B]y means of ideas or images,” Diderot points out, words arrive during our earliest years not only in full force, but in a pell-mell fashion: “aversion, hatred, pleasure, terror, desire, indignation, or contempt” is the cargo they carry. Diderot emphasizes that an “accompanying feeling” sweeps in with each individual word. No wonder a less harrowing, sequential system beckons, which he describes unforgettably. He says that “in the long run we begin to use words like coins,” a method by which we gauge “shape and weight” instead of pondering every detail in order “to determine their value.” The inundation that washed over us as children thereby retreats, and a good thing too. If we didn’t avail of “such abbreviation,” Diderot observes, we’d “need an entire day to utter and appreciate one phrase of any length.” Our relieved adult selves settle into the unfolding course a conversation takes. We gladly “leave the idea or image by the wayside” and we listen to words we’ve defensively learned to line up in well-behaved phrases, “paying attention only to their sound and the associated feeling.” By contrast, the philosopher—a glutton for punishment— is crestfallen by the lackluster intensities “primitively stirred-up” by each sentence: feelings that are secondary, yet also more rudimentary, tag along with

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every “long series of sounds.” Marveling at how “a child’s imagination is so easy to activate,” the philosopher seeks uncertainty; he cultivates “suspicions and doubts” as a way to embrace “the state of infancy.” One implication of this passage from Diderot’s “Salon of 1767” is that the full affective values we experienced during childhood could be ours, and all the time, if we really wanted them. Why would we want a daily barrage of feeling? Such a condition of vulnerability is sought by the philosopher alone, identified by Diderot as he who “weighs, considers, analyzes, and breaks down” the well-worn orders into which we’ve stacked previously unruly words. What the philosopher is not pictured as doing is retracing his footsteps to a chronologically earlier period of his life. Stendhal’s trust in retrospective modes is entirely different from Diderot’s musings in his “Salon of 1767.” In order to defend a gesture Sigalon painted, Stendhal assumed that he could retreat in time. An early period in Locusta’s life—in the life he attributed to her—could endure, or so Stendhal believed, completely intact. Diderot’s figure of the philosopher, however, courts the state of openness that was our lot as children. He earnestly avoids any imposition of distance, because distance would extinguish—all over again—the intensity of originary feeling. We have failed to find in the meditation from the “Salon of 1767” any spooling back in time of the sort we had been anticipating, a failure that requires explanation. This can be done by comparing, on the one hand, Diderot’s evocations of a child’s susceptibility to words, and, on the other hand, the kind of highly systematized approach to language acquisition increasingly prominent in late eighteenth-century France. Étienne Bonnot de Condillac’s Treatise on the Sensations (1754), which appeared 14 years before Diderot’s second “Salon,” provided, as Wilda Anderson has argued, a source for such an approach.18 Now, Condillac’s name suddenly appearing in my discussion may indicate an appetite for the longstanding quarrels bedeviling the scholarship on Stendhal; René Girard hints at their prevalence in his warning against using any interpretative lineage as a “huge key” to Stendhal’s work.19 And the interpretative lineage that exasperates Girard positions Condillac as a defining influence on Destutt de Tracy (perhaps the leading idéologue), with de Tracy himself positioned as a defining influence on Stendhal. Philosophes vis-àvis idéologues: they’re unceremoniously pasted together by Girard. But de Tracy and other idéologues are more typically designated—broadly speaking here—as the star-crossed pursuers of scientific methods inherited from Enlightenment predecessors, especially Condillac. Yet Girard’s justifiable impatience with the explanatory importance—for Stendhal—automatically awarded to the idéologues also allows the highly directed use I now want to make of Condillac’s trust in the remarkable links between language and

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thought. Condillac’s cherished belief was that language has the potential to ultimately function as a self-regulating system.20 What gave Condillac his trust in such self-regulation? Our very superiority as human beings, according to him, lies in our cognitive ability to claim direct access to our thoughts: words do nothing less than provide the means through which we make those thoughts vividly present.21 Our words, then, are conduits to thought; the onus is on us not to cloud that vividness. Distortions leak in, warned Condillac, when we opt for metaphorical or falsely analogical ways of thinking. These wayward routes imperil our untrammeled access to our thought. Suitable drilling from an early age in the correct, perfectly adjusted, use of words could block such distortions, however, well before they installed themselves as opinions. Words might then unfold within the same structure that offered them validation.22 (As Anderson has pointed out, this turned out to be the hope fueling the Revolution’s expansive pedagogical aims: the possibilities of meticulously shaping the introduction of language through every educational tier then came to vital prominence.23) Provided we had been suitably drilled, our use of words would no longer be subject to opinions, and instead, instances of universally applicable truths could be voiced. At stake, then, was what came to be seen—ultimately thanks to Condillac—as language’s potential to function as a dynamic, self-regulating system. Feelings that arrive pell-mell the very minute a new word is introduced, and a state where unpredictability is the order of the day: according to the passage from the “Salon of 1767,” these are the intensities of childhood against which we buffer ourselves. The arguments to which Condillac’s ideas lent themselves appear not just different, but directly opposed. And the opposition that emerges with particular strength is Diderot’s disappointed emphasis on our increasing aversion, as we grow older, to any unpredictability of feeling. That is why the questing figure of the philosopher described in the “Salon of 1767” emerges in an heroic light. In this text at least, the philosopher wants to recuperate the very condition of receptivity from which most of us are only too delighted to flee.

3 I suggest that the strength of disappointment in this meditation on childhood means we can’t claim the writings of Diderot as a ready source for Stendhal’s art criticism. The demand for rigorously plausible drama that Fried has traced in Diderot’s writings on art and theater includes a requirement that each portrayed moment show an obvious, well-earned right to be portrayed: it must occupy a logical place in a sequence of events. These texts are optimal

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sources for those eruptions of deeply rooted, credibly dramatic moments in, for example, the effectively paced genre paintings of Jean-Baptiste Greuze. The dismay palpable in this passage from the “Salon of 1767” is at odds with Diderot the stickler for sequence. Instead, Diderot is disappointed by our toleration of the blunted, the sequential, the routine, which protect us far too successfully from anything unpredictable whatsoever. Even a brief look at Condillac and the influence of his theories underlines the strength of Diderot’s disappointment. After all, Condillac theorized nothing less than a system that could become convinced of its own predictability. When Stendhal mounted a defense of Sigalon’s entirely appropriate, unexaggerated depiction of a notorious poisoner, his explanation hinged on a putative chronology of an imagined life, a life in which a formative period had been, as far as Stendhal was concerned, subsequently trampled. Stendhal attributed kindliness and compassion to this early phase of Locusta’s life; in fact, he claimed these qualities as its automatic hallmarks. If we were to include Stendhal in a Diderotian tradition of French art criticism, a sticking point would be Stendhal’s adherence to a notion of unfolding progressions—of chronologydependent phases. As evoked in the passage from the “Salon of 1767,” the increasing distance that we put between ourselves and childhood turns out to be as much a matter of choice as chronology. It doesn’t disappear into the past simply of its own accord. We prefer to beat a greatly relieved retreat from a cognitive mode: because we become so averse to childhood’s bombardment of temporally disordered feeling (attendant upon the introduction of each and every word), its abandonment seems the best option. Yes, feelings of “pleasure” and “desire” were mixed in with much less agreeable emotions. Why should we invite the whole crew in, however, for the sake of a scintilla of joy? Moreover, those “primitively stirred-up feelings” that attend our daily use of words once we’re adults are not, as evoked by Diderot, exactly inspiring, but are easily bandied around, like old coins. By contrast, the philosopher’s quarry is the entirely unguarded, temporally random mode of childhood.24 He should strive never to get any better at knowing what might happen next; if openness is to be appropriately interminable, a condition of “doubt” and “suspicion” should be his. These features cast doubt on the degree of Fried’s emphasis on a Diderot who formulated demands for iron-clad assurances of temporal order in drama, with depicted actions directly connected to visible causes. At the least, we can now say that no easy comparison obtains between the post-childhood desensitization evoked by Diderot and Stendhal’s retrospective views that a young version of a portrayed figure must offer, by definition, a morally preferable—because more childlike—version of that figure.

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4 Morally preferable—where did Stendhal get this view, which is vital to his justification of Locusta’s gesture? This trust, along with other beliefs that already appear to us utterly distinctive of Stendhal’s writing on art and theater—that impulse toward retrospection, for example—can’t be fully defined, I believe, without some evidence from the History. Let’s not forget, though, how much the meandering History differs in important ways from Stendhal’s “Salon of 1824,” as well as from Racine and Shakespeare. Take the following pinpointed image, which we find in the extremely short chapter entitled “Difficulties in Painting and Drama.”25 Here Stendhal argues that the dramatic imagination and the painterly imagination are one and the same, because, he says, painters and dramatists alike are taxed to make the causes of a dramatic event apprehensible. This is quite a challenge for both, because “passion [itself] cannot be seen with the human eye, only its effects are visible.”26 Stendhal produces this example to illustrate what he means: No description can adequately convey the impression of snow that looks as though it’s been walked on by a round-footed animal [un animal dont les pieds seraient ronds]. To succeed in painting and drama means conveying what exactly this trodden snow is like to those who can only confusedly recall such an image. This description is found near the end of a discussion already likely to deter the most confident painters and dramatists. Stendhal repeats and italicizes “cette neige piétinée”: a patch of snow trodden in a particular way. It is as if he shudders to think that any painter or dramatist might settle for the vaguely evocative, instead of striving for as exquisitely close a fit as possible between cause and effect. There can be no arguing with the precision of his example— snowfall stamped in such a way as to bear inarguable proof of the creature that made the mark, as naturally as breathing, as part of the very act of moving. The History provides other examples of such valorizations. (Their proliferation must number among the deterrents that this text has presented to scholars; they haven’t received previous notice.) Shortly after “Painting’s and Drama’s Difficulty,” Stendhal gives an example—one that has already cropped up in Chapter 1—of how much he trusts the evidence given by imprints and traces, most saliently those carried by the skin. Stendhal praises a “young man from the provinces” whom he sees by chance on a street in Paris. The man’s “fresh complexion” proves that he is in the “best of health.” His appearance announces that he has “recently arrived in Paris”; he lacks any airs traceable

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to the “idleness of the court, boredom,” or “immense excess.”27 For Stendhal, a contrived handsomeness is a poor thing compared to rural comeliness. Just a glimpse of a face stamped by this vascular reflection of good health is all the evidence Stendhal requires for character analysis. (And this is another reason why he was entirely unprepared to concede to Delacroix’s demands in the Chios for a sizable investment of time spent piecing together the corporeal cohesion of the different figures.) Constitutionally receptive surfaces seen as eminently faithful to all that mark them: this is the common denominator, then, between Stendhal’s descriptions of tracks on a patch of snow and a “fresh complexion.” By necessity, each kind of imprinting reflects a substantial span of time. Behind a face briefly glimpsed, it’s possible to discern years spent healthily, well away from Paris; tracks in the snow record with trustworthy and minute precision what is distinctive about that passing animal and no other (according to Stendhal at least). For proprietary traits to register as proprietary traits, they must acquit themselves as dauntingly specific: the kind of evidence that Stendhal requires doesn’t happen overnight. In some cases, the eventful course of a long lifetime must be made palpable: Sigalon’s success in doing exactly this must account for much of the appeal the figure of Locusta holds for Stendhal. The degree to which he is impressed by Sigalon’s depiction of a “hardened” character shows this: a supposedly “hideous and half-naked body” reflects, according to Stendhal, “Locusta’s soul.” All the same, we can only draw limited parallels between, on the one hand, this kind of approval, found both in the “Salon of 1824” and in the passage in Racine and Shakespeare devoted to Hermione’s question, and, on the other hand, those valorizations from the History. First, the examples of imprinting and trace from the earlier text are, as it were, seamless. Tracks across snowfall; a fresh arrival in Paris, unwittingly prominent only to a jaded observer once nurtured far from city streets—neither of these occurrences interrupts the temporal continuum of which they form a part. By contrast, Locusta’s depicted gesture and Hermione’s question depend for their effect on interruption: each character appears abruptly alerted to the horror of premeditated acts of murder. Both the arguably dominant portrayal in the Locusta (the figure of the fallen slave) and the recounting of a terrible event in the Andromache (Orestes’s report on Pyrrhus’s murder) retreat from Stendhal’s center of attention. The role of these defining events, as far as Stendhal is concerned, is to conjure into being a different kind of moment. A second and more complicated point is that Sigalon’s Locusta is defined by an acquired skill: while Stendhal quickly identifies ancient Rome as a context only too conducive to crime, he doesn’t actually say that Locusta imbibed her skills in the first place from her

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environment.28 Yes, what Locusta had learned was seen to belong to her—as integrally as the rosy cheeks of the “young man from the provinces” (thanks to Sigalon’s skill as a painter). But that was because her skill had become habitual. According to Stendhal, it had reverted to the level of instinct. What emerges, then, as most illuminating about Stendhal’s retrospective view of the figure of the poisoner is his conception of an essentially good nature, found even in a lackey of Nero’s court. Unfortunately, habitual behavior had buried Locusta’s essence. Just a few pages before his defense of Sigalon’s painting, we find Stendhal declaring that “passionate feelings” are always present but “in the course of habitual life [they] lie dormant at the bottom of men’s hearts.”29 Here again, habitual life is conjured as that which can blanket or dull emotion; at the same time, this layer or stratum remains permeable and mobile. These perceptions of Stendhal’s share important similarities, I believe, with François-Pierre-Gonthier Maine de Biran’s attention to mobile layers between inner and outer states, especially Maine de Biran’s refusal to break them down into successive components. His Reflections on Thought and Its Decomposition (1803) encompasses the idéologues’ approach to the organization of the mind, reminding us that Condillac was a signal influence on de Tracy.30 Stendhal’s complex aesthetic, I believe, was informed by these intellectual currents in early nineteenth-century France and we would do well to heed Maine de Biran’s particular observation that the workings of a person’s will consist not in bringing to bear a force of consciousness, but in surpassing resistance through effort. Recall that Stendhal does nothing less than project a younger self for the despicable figure of Locusta, one with a “heart susceptible to noble and tender feelings.” It is at this point we arrive at the very reason why Stendhal identified a depicted “truth of feeling” in a now-forgotten painting, a truth impressive enough as to mark out Sigalon as the most promising of an important new group of artists fresh to the Salon. At some stage in the past— the exact stage Stendhal picks up on in defending the “wildness” of the gesture Sigalon had given his figure—even if disposed toward crime, Locusta had to overcome some scruples or misgivings to embark on her apprenticeship. Even the “hardened” Locusta had to learn her trade. And in her case, the nature of the skill being acquired would have exacerbated the effortful, self-aware nature of learning. According to Stendhal, the younger version of the figure Sigalon had depicted instinctively recoiled against what was being imposed on her. And the young Locusta was equipped to immediately construe venality as an affront to character because she possessed an already constituted operative will. This assumption is also one from which de Tracy took his bearings.

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5 Here are views, then, of an essentially stable constellation of the faculties, quite different from our glimpse of Diderot’s modeling of cognition as potentially open to constant dynamism and interaction. For example, Stendhal harks back to a young, necessarily more clement version of Locusta. His readiness to do so indicates a trust in an inherently ethical component to the operation of the will: a trust Stendhal shares with de Tracy. This is why, I suggest, Stendhal perceives a gesture powerfully animated by a moment of resistance: it turns out to be a reactivation of an earlier instance of resistance. Even long years of “hardened” behavior—made so successfully palpable by Sigalon—can’t extinguish the flicker of what was, in the first place, a highly active and agonized mode of thought. Such resistance isn’t learned. Invoking habit in terms of that which is overcome, or cut into, Stendhal imagines this resistance as a function of will. Locusta’s “wild” gesture, then, is for Stendhal a reawakening: her acquired skill took hold only after she overcame an instinctive reaction against it. The extent of this defense, of Stendhal’s investment in Sigalon’s painting, bears emphasis. All this retrospection, all that elaboration, marshaled for the defense of part of a painting by his favorite contemporary artist. Perhaps this explanation wrings out all that Stendhal can offer in front of a painting; in any case the ambitious undertaking of the “Salon of 1824” is a precedent he didn’t follow. After 1824, he substantially retreated from art criticism. At any rate, what we can say here is that our awareness of the indefatigable defense Stendhal gladly gives Sigalon offers us a vantage point, as it were, from which to survey and clarify a number of strands in his writings on painting and theater. One of these strands is Stendhal’s complicated dislike of David. Scholarly investigation of Stendhal’s animosity has been limited to shorthand notices. But Stendhal’s reference to “all the passionate feelings” imagined as buried under layers of habit (but nonetheless latent in “men’s hearts”) crops up as Stendhal is in the midst of criticizing David’s Sabines (see fig. 29). The gleaming inclusion of Romulus (the Roman husband of the Sabine woman who focuses David’s composition) irritates Stendhal. “Impassive” and poised in the face of an extreme situation, Stendhal says that supposedly “this man battles for his throne and for his life” and yet “all he can think of” is how best to pose “to show us his fine muscles and display how gracefully he throws his spear.”31 Stendhal is remarkably miffed by Romulus—and he stays that way. In fact, Stendhal leaves details of the Sabines’ narrative pretty sketchy, because he rushes to an impassioned contrast between the appalling Romulus and the kind of redoubtable character that, according to Stendhal, any French soldier inhabits like a second skin.32 Stendhal sticks up for this fellow as follows: “[t]here is not

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one of our soldiers who, obscurely fighting to win the respect of his company, and certainly without any personal hate against the enemy he attacks, does not have twenty times more expression [than Romulus].” The risible bareness of the Sabines’ warriors, the “completely naked men” depicted as engaged in battle, is also indignantly rejected. In fact, the scrupulous Stendhal requires us to picture nude soldiers charging into battle. “[C]ommon sense indicates,” Stendhal asserts, “that the legs of those soldiers would soon be covered in blood.”33 With his usual eye for consequences, the laws of gravity are the first thing Stendhal mentions: previously gleaming legs would soon drip colorful evidence of combat. No wonder it has proved easier to parcel up the unflinching specificity of this and related observations about David’s painting into a generalized rallying cry for “modern” art, than to see how they belong to the distinguishing features of Stendhal’s writings. All of which leads me to focus on a recurring preference for a particular kind of portrayed action—one that looks hunted back, as it were, to a core of instinct or reflex. This response is not unexpected, given everything we’ve observed about Stendhal. For example, Stendhal’s interest in a canvas by one of Sigalon’s nouvelle école peers at the exhibition of 1824—here we turn again to the impact made by Cogniet’s Massacre of the Innocents—is sparked when he hears, via public acclaim, which moment Cogniet has chosen to depict (see fig. 21). Stendhal’s eventual disappointment with Cogniet’s canvas doesn’t detract from the fact that his advance enthusiasm is generated by what he takes to be the painting’s focus on instinct. According to Stendhal, Cogniet had chosen an excellent moment: one in which “a mother tries to save her son from the executioner’s fury by stopping him from crying out.”34 No wonder Stendhal is delighted. A gesture compressing two instincts in one: what a brilliant decision to have us appreciate the protective and maternal at the same time as we notice a child’s reflex to cry out in alarm.35 Counterpointing his approval for Cogniet’s choices is Stendhal’s aversion to the great contemporary actor François-Joseph Talma. References to Talma crop up in Racine and Shakespeare, but it is Stendhal’s memoirs of the 1820s that reveal his scorn for the actor. Now, Stendhal’s exposure to his stage presence was restricted to the final years of Talma’s long career, during which time Talma continued to play parts he had first taken on years earlier. No surprise, then, to discover issues of chronological age and sequence cropping up again as sticking points for Stendhal. Unable to relax his stringent criteria for character-appropriateness, he recoils at Talma blithely accepting roles that are just too young for him. In such cases, the illusion of the role crumbles because the aging actor can’t feign that which is most innate.36 Stendhal shudders at the thought of Talma’s performances: “the trembling wrists, the affected gait.” At

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the heart of this scandalized objection to the old actor playing a young part is the idea that if age has already claimed the everyday gestures of the actor— those on the level of the habitual—then age also claims the dramatic gesture.37 Stendhal despairs of finding evidence of a temporal continuum that he can find credible, let alone any “delicious” moment of “complete illusion.” In fact, he keeps an eye on the clock. How long can Stendhal tolerate the sight of Talma on stage? No more than “five minutes.” Investigation of the History illuminates the development of such unyielding responses, which are key to Stendhal’s aesthetic. Especially important, I believe, are the terms of his approval for a figure from Masaccio’s Baptism of the Neophytes by St Peter (1427; fig. 61).38 In 1817, Stendhal’s praise for Masaccio’s ability to convey strong expressiveness was nothing new (fodder for the many negative appraisals of the History has been supplied by its reticence about sources). “[T]rembling with cold” because he “has just undressed,” this impatient candidate awaiting baptism marks, according to Stendhal, the “birth of expression” in painting. (The composition’s focus is in fact the bowed, drenched head of the prayerful fellow neophyte, who is already in the river.) The impression that, as Vasari also puts it, this particular figure is “trembling” is conveyed by his crisscrossed arms and tensed, slightly stooped posture. But Stendhal’s endorsement doesn’t center solely on Masaccio’s powerful modeling of torso and limbs or advanced fresco technique, features that have traditionally been named in critical praise for this fresco. Instead, what captures Stendhal’s interest is a familiar focus: gestures and expressions he reads as instinctive. To Stendhal, the crossed arms and furrowed brow Masaccio gave this figure on the riverbank look as spontaneously generated, as pleasingly integral, as the “rosy cheeks” of an optimistic young provincial or the flung-out arm and aged appearance of Sigalon’s Locusta (see fig. 55). Of greatest importance here, I believe, is the exceptional ease with which the “just undressed” figure Masaccio painted in the Brancacci Chapel meets Stendhal’s criteria. Like tracks in the snow or glowing skin, Stendhal approves of an action belonging to a continuum he sees as instinctive. The neophyte’s thoughts haven’t yet climbed to an elevation necessary to blot out discomfort (the figure in the water has achieved such composure). A body depicted as shivering of its own accord captivates Stendhal. So perfectly does this figure from the Italian Renaissance meet with Stendhal’s approval that he receives the imprimatur of the “birth of expression.” This thematic of instinctive, reflexive action is one that I find central in Stendhal’s criticism, and more promising, perhaps, than certain intellectual genealogies.

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6 Why do Locusta’s gesture and Hermione’s question generate such rapturous enthusiasm in Stendhal? We are now in a position to offer an exact answer to this question. These portrayed actions achieve their effect by interrupting or changing the evidence of the continuum they make palpable. At the very same time they satisfy Stendhal’s requirement for the kind of the evidence for which he pines, throughout the chapter “Painting and Drama’s Difficulty” in the History, to see proof that painting and drama can pack into any one moment a remarkably extensive record of previous events. I emphasize again that querulous chapter’s pessimism regarding the abilities of either painters or dramatists to fulfill the challenges he sets before them. Stendhal’s History almost gives the impression that he dismisses objections about the impossibility of conveying such a record. The passage specifying animal tracks in the snow is much more packed, as it were, than the rigorous criteria for the dramatic moment increasingly honed throughout the eighteenth century in the writings of Lessing, Grimm, and Shaftesbury. That is because Stendhal remains unflinching about the amount of evidence necessary, as he sees it, to convey a fullness of emotion in one scene, whether on canvas or on the stage: full depiction includes much more than the “footfall” of the past that Shaftesbury required. This must be part of the reason Stendhal’s chapter ends by dangling a standard of the greatest difficulty in front of painters and dramatists. The imprinting he prizes is not made by a paintbrush. It is also completely silent in its effects. But it shows that abbreviation is not a hindrance: animal tracks reassuringly signify to Stendhal the possibility of great informational compression. Moreover, they extinguish any margin for fudging, vagueness, or generality (remember how he refers to “round-footed”). The requirement for nothing short of imprinting explains Stendhal’s contempt for the aging Talma; it’s also behind his praise for a fresh complexion. In addition, the characteristics of a fresh complexion, reflexive shivering, maternal instinct, not to mention an infant’s terror, arise in reaction to, or as if generated by, the immediate environment. (For example, a sudden drop in temperature or an impending threat.) In fact, except for the animal prints in the snow, the signs Stendhal privileges don’t—in fact they can’t—leave any trace (the chilly candidate for sacramental immersion is bound to stop shivering as soon as the figure of St Peter calls him to baptism). By contrast, animal tracks in the snow are evidence of something now gone, vanished from the scene. I’ve indicated the possibility of a new reading of Stendhal’s criticism, one that points out his preference for an emphatic organization of temporal

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settings in painting and drama. This approach takes what might be called its ultimately ethical bearings from the optimistic view of intrinsic will theorized by Maine de Biran. This setting for Stendhal’s art criticism fills a lacuna in the critical literature; it also posits a greater expansiveness for organizing models of pictorial and dramatic duration. With this context now woven in place, we can return to the Chios with a new understanding, because this painting so consistently and eloquently refuses the circuits of cause and implacably logical effect that its most famous adversary advocated: it appeared as a painting about inaction populated by “animated corpses,” playing random variations on fatiguing ambiguity.

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Envoi

A painting such as the Chios, with its apparently disorganized depiction of time, is not necessarily an aberration in the tradition of the dramatic moment. Stendhal was not able to even consider an analysis of the painting; his own strict template enjoining sequentially organized moments would have prevented him, I believe, from recognizing anything clear or unified in the Chios. And it is true that the Chios does not work within the boundaries of the tradition of the dramatic moment: it does not follow Géricault’s Raft. The Chios represents an effort to furnish new models in a tradition that had become increasingly problematic. By 1824, major painting, which still largely referred to the prestigious genre of historical subjects portrayed on a grand scale with many figures, had become acutely problematic and nearly disabled. With the Raft still its most outstanding representative, multi-figure painting appeared debilitated, its grounds for progression straitened. In general, critics clamored to shore up the Chios, as it were, by immediately supplying their views on what is taking place in the painting. These views entail missteps, varying emphases, and misreadings. The various subtractions, omissions, and deletions made by critics testify to their bafflement. In their haste to tell a story and “fix” an action, the critics sometimes brushed by essential elements in the composition itself. In general, we find a desire to supplement the scene, and an opposite proclivity toward deleting things. But adding and subtracting are here two sides of one coin. The same may be said of Stendhal. He distributed the dislike we saw him articulate in the previous chapter for the Chios’s central figure throughout the painting as a whole. “I have tried hard,” he declared, “but I can’t admire M. Delacroix and his Massacre at Chios.” In this book I have suggested a new way to understand the work of Delacroix. My context has been an examination of the critical field of the 1824 Salon, which shaped, I believe, the kinds of work he did in the later 1820s and beyond. My interpretive aim has been to remain responsible to the challenging longevity of Delacroix’s career while accounting for the inner rationale of his development. This dual awareness has been lacking in Delacroix scholarship, even as it has posited his more or less seamless development.

But Delacroix cannot offer both a way station on the path to later French painting, and also a cipher. In the formative years of Delacroix’s career, painting’s value system adhered to the Salon’s pictorial orders, yet the potential for change in these orders was contracting under pressure at the very same time that success was growing harder to achieve. This predicament, epitomized in the straitened possibilities for the tableau, must at least be partly attributed to the weight of theoretical models that tended to favor painters who exchanged new lamps for old. The solutions for reform invited by the two critical models of the period depended, to put it broadly, upon two ingenious reversions to David: on the one hand, the depiction of a great central figure, and, on the other, the representation of a transfixing central action. Yet reconstructing these models diminished opportunities for extended inquiry into the inner states of the depicted figures. The solutions Delacroix found in his work operated both within and against the ailing traditions he had inherited, leading to a variety of critical responses, often of incomprehension, but also of emphatic praise. Delacroix’s prospects unfolded in this setting and in the irreversibility of his historical moment. His endeavor was shot through with instability and yearning, and it cannot be a straightforward predecessor of the encompassing transformations wrought by a Manet or a Courbet. Delacroix’s achievement was not founded on a stance of detachment, but was authorized by the field of possibility in which he found himself: hence the oscillation between the two critical directions, which itself became an enabling mode for the artist. In the past decade, several important initiatives have greatly augmented our ability to appreciate the sheer difficulty of Delacroix’s painting.1 In 2005, Susan Siegfried’s Ingres insisted on the centrality of Ingres’s history painting as against the beauty and fascination of his portraiture.2 Her account spans the decades from the inaugural excitement of Romanticism in the 1820s to the advent of Manet and the generation of the 1860s. What emerges is Ingres’s steadfast efforts to keep his painting relevant, in spite of the institutionalization of narrative painting exemplified by Gérôme. Siegfried’s determination to fully account for even the most legendarily intractable of Ingres’s works suggests, I think, a parallel with Delacroix’s later decades. In that sense, her study offers an analogy to what I have attempted to do in this book, and further study might usefully expand on the structural similarities between the two painters’ trajectories despite their enormous differences.3 Another sign of the emerging awareness of the overall complexity of Delacroix’s career and its relation to Romanticism after the 1820s was a

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conference held in 2013 in Santa Barbara.4 The conference’s organizer Eik Kahng was interested in why there are so many multiple versions of identical subjects, figures, and even parts of figures in Delacroix’s later work. Kahng was also struck by the still-ongoing controversies around Delacroix’s catalogue raisonné. Both these problems are connected to themes I have been pursuing throughout this book: for example, commentators’ recurring tendency to extract individual figures or parts of figures as exemplary of Delacroix’s work. Kahng’s research could open out and enrich the account I have developed here regarding the critical reception. A number of scholars at that conference, including Nina Athanassoglou-Kallmyer, Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby, and Marc Gotlieb, also addressed issues that bear on the development of Delacroix and Romanticism after the 1820s.5 One of the results of the new scholarship is a better understanding of the complexity and difficulty of the later years. Delacroix’s tenacity in sustaining his version of Romanticism into the middle and later decades of the nineteenth century obliged him to forage for ever more obscure narrative subjects. Counterintuitive as it may sound, we need to see late paintings like the Shipwreck of Don Juan as an attempt to extend the viability of David’s history painting of the 1780s well beyond the middle of the nineteenth century. Cocooned in his increasingly isolated studio, decades after the Chios, Delacroix found himself bound to the compulsion to always begin from an already depicted source, even if that source was in one of his own previous works. These kinds of complexities, which emerged in the Santa Barbara conference, are entwined with the history of fragmentary reception that I have been exploring in this book. It is no longer possible to be reconciled with the “generalized” and “familiar” artist whose clichéd portrait I painted at the beginning of Chapter 1. A complicated and contradictory response, such as the one that is currently emerging, is actually in the spirit of Delacroix’s most resourceful contemporary critic, Baudelaire. And yet there is paradox here. Baudelaire has been my most important example of the impulse, which has marked the reception of Delacroix since his paintings first appeared on the Salon’s walls, to extract elements from larger pictures in an attempt to make cohesive sense of an elusive artist. In this way Delacroix and the larger fields of Romanticism offer us interpretive problems as challenging as the ones that place Manet at the center of both modernism and its historiography.

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Appendix 1 Étienne-Jean Delécluze, Le Mécanicien roi

This is the complete text of Delécluze’s short novel, discussed in chapter 2. It is taken from Delécluze, Mademoiselle Justine de Liron et le mécanicien roi: nouvelles (Paris, 1832), 255–300, correlated with Romans, contes et nouvelles, nouvelles éditions, revues et corrigées (Paris, 1845), 527–40. Vers 1808 ou 1809, j’eus besoin de faire emplette d’une paire de rasoirs. On m’indiqua un habile coutelier qui demeur[a]it rue Saint-Honoré, et j’allai le trouver. En entrant chez lui, je fus frappé de la ressemblance des traits de son visage avec ceux de Descartes; c’ét[a]ient les mêmes cheveux noirs, la même figure pâle et creusée; comme dans la physionomie du philosophe, je retrouvai dans celle de l’artisan, cette même pénétration calme, repos passager d’une [â] me ardente. Il me fit voir plusieurs pièces de coutellerie que je lui demand[a] is; mais à peine eus-je fait quelques observations sur l’inutilité de l’éclat du manche de pareils outils, qu’il replaça ses rasoirs dans un montre élégante. — Vous avez raison, dit-il, mais tout cela, voyez-vous, est fait pour ceux qui passent; on ne les attire qu’avec ce qui brille. Venez par ici, avec moi. En disant ces mots, il mit le pied sur une petite échelle qui conduis[a]it dans une cave, et j’y descendis après lui. C’était son atelier privé. Du milieu d’un c[ha]os d’outils, de meules, de morceaux de métaux et de machines dont j’ignor[a]is l’usage, il retira une paire de rasoirs fort simples qu’il me remit entre les mains. — Voilà, dit-il, ce qu’il vous faut; donnez-moi dix francs. [À] peine l’av[a]is-je payé, qu’il mit devant moi une serrure de sûreté d’une invention admirable et parfaitement exécutée, quoique non finie. — Pourquoi, lui demandai-je, n’achevez-vous pas cet ouvrage? Ce morceau, exposé parmi les produits de l’industrie nationale, vous fer[a]it conn[a]ître, et votre fortune ser[a]it faite. — Ma fortune? reprit-il, en laissant échapper un sourire qui exprim[a] it de l’indifférence et m[ê]me du mépris, ah! pour cela peu m’importe; tenez continue-t-il, en jetant sur son établi une batterie de fusil et une giberne d’une invention toute particulière, voilà ce qui aur[a]it dû me faire conn[a]ître—Mais avec celui-là!… Humph!—Il suffit qu’une bonne idée ne vienne pas de lui pour qu’il la rejette. J’all[a]is parler, il m’arrêta en continuant: — Oui, monsieur, avec de l’infanterie comme la nôtre, si l’on adopt[a]

it ma batterie et ma giberne, il n’y aur[a]it pas d’ennemis au monde qui pussent nous résister. Il mit alors un soin et une vivacité extrême à m’expliquer le mérite de son invention, jusqu’à ce qu’après en avoir entièrement montré l’effet, il jeta le tout loin de lui avec un dépit furieux. — Tout cela, ajouta-t-il, il ne faut plus y penser. Monsieur l’Empereur n’en veut pas; tout est dit—Et savez-vous quelle récompense je demand[a]is? —Que l’on mît mon nom, mon pauvre nom, Michel, sur mes batteries!—Mais cela ne fais[a]it pas son compte—C’est un grand N qu’il y voudr[a]it mettre, et puis me donner de l’argent. Vilain jaloux de la gloire des autres! Il lui faut tout! L’agitation de Michel ét[a]it extrême, et je jugeai à propos de ne pas la prolonger, en revenant sur ce sujet. Pour préparer un changement de conversation, je fis un tour sur moi-même, au milieu de tous les objets dont la cave ét[a]it encombrée, et portant la main sur un petit appareil en bois, que je soupçonnai propre à la recherche du mouvement perpétuel, qu’est-cela? lui dis-je? — Oh! rien, répondit-il aussitôt en repoussant la petite mécanique, comme s’il eût craint que je n’en devinasse l’objet; c’est une idée qui m’est venue et qui n’est pas mûre encore; mais voilà ce qui m’occupe en ce moment. En disant ces mots, il montr[a]it du doigt un fourneau, des creusets et une boîte, tout en fixant son regard avec force et gravité sur le mien. — Cette boîte, ajouta-t-il, sans changer d’attitude, renferme une composition métallique dont la propriété sera tout-à-fait singulière, quand elle aura atteint sa perfection. Alors ce métal sera susceptible de recevoir un poli si parfait, il deviendra si pénétrable, qu’en lui faisant réfléchir un objet il en retiendra l’image pour toujours dès qu’il aura été trempé. — Un léger sourire d’incrédulité sillonna mes lèvres. —[É]coutez, monsieur, dit Michel, en s’approchant de mon oreille, je ne demande que trois mois encore pour achever ce miroir, et vous en verrez l’effet. Ce délai me mit plus à l’aise, et voyant à quel homme j’av[a]is affaire, je ne le heurtai pas dans ses idées. Je crus agir prudemment, en lui donnant de nouveau le conseil de profiter de son rare talent pour accroître et assurer sa fortune; mais à ce dernier mot il fit un signe de tête négatif qui m’étonna. — Vous avez une femme, des enfants, sans doute, lui dis-je, il faut penser à eux. Michel lais[s]a tomber sa tête, porta la main à ses yeux et se mit à pleurer. Interdit, j’attend[a]is sa réponse. — Il y à aujourd’hui trois mois, dit-il enfin en sanglotant, que mon pauvre petit Charles est mort; et sa mère, ma pauvre Thérèse, qui est là-haut

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malade, ne tardera pas à le suivre. — Mais pourquoi rejeter ainsi toute espérance? — Ah! monsieur, reprit Michel, qui, par un grand effort sur lui-même, ét[a]it parvenu à arrêter tout à coup ses pleurs, si Thérèse à huit jours à vivre, c’est beaucoup; hier le médecin à été obligé de me dire la vérité. Elle est malade de la poitrine. Michel essuya ses yeux, dérangea une partie des outils amoncelés, pour me faire un chemin, et me prit par le bras en disant : — Il faut que vous voyiez ma pauvre Thérèse. Nous nous dirigeâmes vers un angle de la cave où ét[a]it pratiqué un escalier tournant qui men[a]it à l’arrière-boutique. [À] peine y fus-je monté, que je vis en effet madame Michel, la pauvre Thérèse, étendue sur une chaise longue. Malgré la pâleur de son visage et sa maigreur extrême, la beauté de son regard et la douceur angélique de sa physionomie me firent une profonde impression. Michel s’en aperçut, et comme il m’approch[a]it un siége à côté de sa femme, je surpris dans ses yeux une espèce de satisfaction passagère que lui caus[a]it mon émotion. Il se tint debout près de moi. — N’est-ce pas, me dit alors Thérèse, d’une voix éteinte mais assez libre, n’est-ce pas que Michel est un habile ouvrier? Comme je lui témoignai le cas particulier que je fais[a]is des talents de son mari, mes éloges firent naître sur sa belle figure un de ces sourires de satisfaction mêlée de tendresse, qu’il n’appartient qu’à l’orgueil conjugal de produire. — Je vois bien, ajouta-t-elle, en me faisant un signe d’intelligence, que vous êtes un véritable connoisseur, car Michel n’en fait pas descendre d’autres dans son atelier. Eh! vraiment tout le monde dit bien que Michel n’a pas son égal à Paris. S’il ét[a]it aussi raisonnable qu’il est habile, je ne le gronder[a]is pas si souvent; n’est-ce pas, Michel? — C’est vrai, Thérèse, dit le mari, en baissant la tête. — Grondez-le donc aussi, vous, monsieur, me dit-elle avec grâce, grondez-le de ce qu’il s’occupe de mille extravagances qui le détournent de son état. Sans ces distractions, notre fortune serait faite et nous pourrions nous retirer. Je te préviens, Michel, que dès que je serai guérie je veux aller à la campagne; ainsi, travaille pour avoir une petite, maison—avec un verger et un parterre de fleurs; n’est-ce pas, Michel? — Oui, Thérèse. — Tu m’achèteras aussi une petite chèvre? — Oui, Thérèse. — Et tu auras un atelier pour t’occuper auprès de moi[?] — Oui, Thérèse.

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— Et nous serons bien heureux; n’est-ce pas, Michel? — Oui, Thérèse. Michel étouff[a]it de douleur. Pour abréger son supplice, je me levai en prenant un air d’autorité, afin d’engager la malade à ne plus se fatiguer en parlant, et j’entraînai son mari dans la boutique. — Ah! ma pauvre Thérèse! Ce fut tout ce qu’il put dire en sanglotant, et il me quitta brusquement pour redescendre dans la cave où il m’av[a]it conduit d’abord. Un voyage m’éloigna de Paris pour quelque temps. [À] mon retour j’allai pour voir Michel et sa femme, mais la boutique ét[a]it fermée, et j’appris des voisins la mort de Thérèse et la disparition de Michel, qui, disait-on, peu réservé dans ses propos, av[a]it été obligé d’éviter par une fuite prompte les poursuites de la police. Depuis ce moment, c’est-à-dire pendant près de seize ans, je n’entendis plus parler de cet homme. Il y à quelques années qu’en revenant du fond de l’Angleterre, je m’arrêtai à Matlock-les-Bains, dans l’intention de visiter les petites merveilles du Derbyshire et des bords du Derwent. [À] table d’hôte j’appris d’un jeune Angl[a]is qu’un Français, âgé de cinquante ans environ, av[a]it été ramené des Etats-Unis par une famille angl[a]ise, dans un état complet de folie. Ce malade et les personnes qui l’accompagn[a]ient se repos[a]ient en effet à Matlock en attendant qu’ils reprissent la route de Londres, où quelques parents du fou dev[a]ient se charger de lui et de la gestion de la fortune que ce malheureux av[a]it acquise en Amérique. — L’histoire de cet homme est singulière, me dit le jeune Angl[a]is; on assure que c’est un mécanicien des plus habiles, soit qu’il invente, soit qu’il exécute. Il s’ét[a]it échappé de France autrefois, on ne sait pas trop pour quelle raison. Arrivé à New Yorck [sic], ses talents lui av[a]ient déjà fait obtenir d’assez brillants moyens d’existence, quand une compagnie qui se forma pour établir des bateaux à vapeur sur le lac Ontario, le chargea de tous les détails de construction relatifs à cette grande entreprise. Sa fortune fut rapide. On prétend que l’état d’aisance où il arriva si brusquement l’a entraîné à quelques excès de libertinage qui augmentèrent la disposition naturelle qu’il pouv[a]it avoir à la folie. Ce qu’il y a de certain, c’est qu’occupé à la surveillance des machines, et en butte, dit-on, à la jalousie de quelques-uns de ses subordonnés, le malheur a voulu que la chaudière d’un bâtiment qu’il montait il y à six mois fit explosion. Une bonne partie de l’équipage périt. Lui fut sauvé sans avoir même reçu de blessures apparentes. On s’aperçut, deux jours après; que sa raison était troublée, et qu’il av[a]it complétement oublié la langue angl[a]ise, dont il fais[a]it toujours usage depuis quelques années. J’interrompis mon narrateur pour lui demander s’il me ser[a]it possible

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de voir cet homme. — Sans doute, répondit l’Anglais; vous obligerez même les personnes qui l’entourent, car elles savent à peine quelques mots de français. Quant au malade, je pense que votre présence et votre conversation ne peuvent que lui être agréables et salutaires. On a au moins l’espérance qu’il sera plus tranquille lorsqu’il cessera d’entendre parler l’angl[a]is, qui excite toujours sa colère. C’est pour cela qu’on s’empresse de le faire rentrer en France. Le déjeuner fini, le jeune Angl[a]is me conduisit à la maison habitée par le fou. Mon conducteur dit deux mots à ses compatriotes, et je fus introduit dans la chambre du malade. C’ét[a]it bien lui. Malgré son front devenu chauve et le reste de ses cheveux blanchis, je reconnus aussitôt Michel. Il ét[a]it assis, paraiss[a]it préoccupé et ten[a]it sur ses genoux cette même boîte au miroir métallique qu’il m’av[a]it montrée anciennement. Je m’approchai de lui sans témoigner ni crainte ni hésitation, précaution importante auprès des cerveaux malades. — Monsieur Michel, lui dis-je alors, me reconnaissez-vous? Il porta attentivement son regard sur moi comme pour s’assurer de la réponse qu’il all[a]it faire; puis, après avoir souri légèrement : — Nous aurons bientôt fait conn[a]issance, dit-il, puisque vous parlez un langage intelligible, et il versa quelques pleurs de joie. Ce début me donna bonne espérance, et je m’empressai de saisir la main qu’il me tendit. — Je suis bien malheureux, continua-t-il en laissant tomber son regard vers la terre, personne ne veut plus parler avec moi, et ils ont tous fait un complot pour me refuser ce que je demande. — Mais je viens au contraire, Monsieur Michel, pour savoir ce que vous désirez. Il releva la tête, son oeil s’anima. — Ser[a]it-il vrai? Ne me trahirez-vous pas aussi? — Non, ayez confiance en moi, et soyez certain que je vous ferai obtenir tout ce qui dépendra de moi. — Eh bien! je vais voir à l’instant, continua-t-il avec gravité, si je puis compter sur vous. Voyez-vous ce lac? (En parlant ainsi, il montr[a]it à travers les vitres la petite rivière du Derwent qui coule à quelque distance de la maison.) Je meurs d’envie de faire une promenade sur le lac—Allons sur le lac! Mes geôliers s’y opposent, mais vous, vous me conduirez sur le lac!—Eh bien!…vous me refusez?— — Non, répondis-je enfin, après avoir réfléchi aux suites de ma promesse, et je vais tout préparer pour vous satisfaire. Il me tendit la main, secoua la mienne avec force en disant: Je vous attends.

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Je donnai les détails de cette entrevue aux personnes qui pren[a]ient soin du malade. Puis le jeune Angl[a]is et moi nous sortîmes pour aller nous assurer de deux barques. L’erreur qui fais[a]it prendre à Michel de Derwent pour un lac, me donn[a]it bien quelque inquiétude; aussi convînmes-nous que, pendant que je ser[a]is avec lui dans un bateau, il y en aur[a]it un autre derrière à peu de distance, afin que l’on pût me prêter secours en cas de besoin. Ces préparatifs achevés, j’allai chercher Michel, qui, debout, le chapeau sur la tête, et son miroir suspendu à son côté, attend[a]it mon retour avec impatience. Il prit mon bras, se mit en marche d’un manière alerte, et monta même assez lestement dans le bateau avec moi. Le rameur, qui ét[a]it Angl[a] is, avait reçu l’ordre de ne pas proférer une seule parole, afin de ne pas irriter le malade auquel j’av[a]is eu soin de dire que notre pilote ét[a]it muet, ce qui l’av[a]it singulièrement réjoui. Notre promenade commença. Or il est à propos de savoir que le Derwent est une petite rivière qui n’a pas toujours six toises de large aux environs de Matlock, et que ses bords encaissés dans des roches assez élevées sont couverts d’arbres qui s’avancement tellement quelquefois sur l’eau que leurs branches touchent aux bateaux des promeneurs. Cette espèce de navigation au milieu d’une forêt ét[a]it loin de donner l’idée d’un lac, et je trembl[a]is dans la crainte que mon pauvre Michel ne m’accusât de l’avoir trompé. Il en fut autrement. Il ét[a]it décidément sur un très grand lac et à l’épanouissement de sa physionomie, ainsi qu’à la manière dont il promen[a]it horizontalement son regard, il ét[a]it facile de deviner qu’il se croy[a]ît au milieu d’une vaste étendue d’eau. Une digue qui intercepte la navigation du côté de la route de Derby, en limitant la promenade nous forç[a] it de retourner d’où nous venions. Cette manœuvre m’inquiéta encore; mais Michel me rassura aussitôt en disant: —Ah! c’est bon, on change de direction. On a raison, il y a un courant en cet endroit. Puis après quelques instant de silence: —Nous avons bien fait quinze milles déjà, n’est-ce pas? ajouta-t-il, car on ne voit plus le rivage. Je me gardai bien de faire aucune observation sur ses paroles. Mon homme resta silencieux pendant quelque temps encore, après quoi il reprit d’un air grave, mais calme: — Vous voyez bien ce grand lac? Eh bien! tout cet espace a été habité, il y a eu là des hommes, et, je ne dis cela qu’à vous seul au moins, j’en ai été roi. Tout a été détruit, tout a été abîmé, excepté moi. Je suis le reste d’un monde… Oh! j’ai commis une grande faute, mais j’en ai été bien puni… Savez-vous que, quand je vins ici pour première fois, ils furent si surpris qu’ils me prirent pour un sorcier? Mais cela n’est pas étonnant, dit Michel. en me parlant bas à oreille,

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j’av[a]is le secret du mouvement perpétuel et je l’ai combiné avec la puissance de la vapeur et des eaux: comprenez-vous maintenant? Je fis un signe affirmatif. — Alors je trouvai[s] au bas d’une montagne et près du rivage une caverne spacieuse. C’est là où j’établis ma machine-mère. Elle n’en eut pas plus tôt produit une semblable à elle-même, que celle-ci en enfanta une autre, puis une autre, lesquelles en vomirent encore de nouvelles, qui se multiplièrent sans repos et sans fin. Chose admirable à voir! tout cela flott[a]it sur l’eau sans se toucher, sans se heurter jamais; et cependant tous les mouvements se transmett[a]ient avec une rapidité surprenante; mais tout, exactement tout ét[a] it prévu. Aussi, meubles, administrations, batterie de cuisine, bibliothèques, artillerie, tourne-broches, horloges et jusqu’à la monn[a]ie, tout, tout ét[a]it confectionné, employé, régularisé, nettoyé, compté et empilé au moyen de menues machines, que de plus grandes mett[a]ient en mouvement d’après l’impulsion donnée par la machine-mère. La place de chaque objet et de chaque personne, l’espace qu’ils dev[a]ient occuper et parcourir, ét[a]ient mesurés et calculés de telle sorte que qui que ce fût ne pouv[a]it se soustraire à la vigilance des autres, et que le plus petit objet ne cour[a]it pas le risque de s’égarer. Pas de menteurs, pas de voleurs, pas de traîtres, pas d’assassins; tout le monde ét[a]it forcé d’être vertueux!—Michel, après avoir laissé échapper un grand éclat de rire qui lui fut arraché par l’idée du succès de ses inventions, redevint tout à coup triste et morne. — Tous vertueux! répéta-t-il plusieurs fois, tous vertueux!—Excepté moi! Il prononça ces derniers mots en poussant de profonds soupirs. Je mis tout en usage, prières et caresses, pour le calmer, et je réussis assez bien. Il ten[a]it ma main dans les siennes, et après m’avoir regardé pendant quelques instants avec une bienveillance mêlée de tristesse: — Que vous êtes heureux! me dit-il, vous n’avez jamais été maître; vous n’avez jamais été roi; vous n’avez jamais eu l’envie et le pouvoir de faire le mal? Eh bien! moi, je l’ai fait. Je l’ai médité, je l’ai calculé, je l’ai machinisé!… Quand on est roi, il faut de l’argent? Eh bien! j’ai dit qu’on ne m’en donn[a] it pas suffisamment. On a répondu que si; j’ai soutenu que non; eux et moi nous nous sommes brouillés, et je me suis retiré dans ma caverne—Hélas, mon Dieu! je n’eus besoin que de toucher un petit point de la machine, à l’instant j’augmentai de deux dents tous les r[â]teaux destinés à transmettre la monn[a] ie, et bon gré mal gré, j’eus tout ce que je voul[a]is. Un petit retour de vanité anima encore la figure de Michel, qui retomba presqu’aussitôt dans ses idées graves de repentir. — Si je m’en ét[a]is tenu là! reprit-il en soupirant, oh! ayez pitié de

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moi, puisque je vous dis tout!—Il y av[a]it là des femmes qui m’ont tenté, des maris qui me gên[a]ient—Maudites soient les inventions qui me sont venues!— Voyez-vous des machines qui poussent ceux-ci d’un côté, tandis qu’elles entraînent celles-là de l’autre?—Et puis des cris, des injures, des malédictions sur moi—Oh! quel enfer!—Et quand j’ét[a]is rentré dans ma caverne, je n’ét[a] is occupé que du soin de visiter et d’affermir ma machine, pas un moment de repos, toujours combinaison sur combinaison pour prévoir des obstacles. Aussi j’ai toujours été le plus fort, aussi ils m’ont pris en horreur—Oh! c’ét[a]it bien triste dans ma caverne, mais leurs cris m’y repouss[a]ient toujours… Que d’efforts j’ai faits pour les empêcher de crier! mais mon art m’a toujours trahi, je n’ai pu y parvenir. Après un instant de silence, Michel parut rassembler comme sur un point imperceptible toute la force de son attention, et il continua ainsi : — Dans ma solitude, et pour me distraire, je copiai dans les dimensions les plus petites tout ce qui exist[a]it réellement en grand sur le lac, et par un mécanisme intermédiaire, je parvins à reproduire dans un petit monde que j’av[a]is entre mes mains et sous mes yeux, la contre-épreuve de tout ce qui s’agit[a]it sur une étendue immense. J’ét[a]is présent à tout ce qui se fais[a]it; j’entend[a]is tout ce que l’on dis[a]it de moi! Oh! si vous saviez ce qu’ils dis[a] ient de moi! Bientôt je n’eus plus le courage de regarder mon petit monde. J’y voy[a]is trop bien le découragement et l’ennui s’ét[a]ient emparés de tous ceux qui habit[a]ient le grand. Chaque jour je les voy[a]is devenir plus maigres, plus jaunes, et pour ceux qui conserv[a]ient encore quelque vigueur, ils n’en fais[a] ient usage que pour me maudire, et chercher à briser les inévitables coulisses sur lesquelles je les fais[a]is glisser. Ce fut alors que mon ouvrage m’effraya; j’aurais voulu le changer… impossible!… Vous sentez la conséquence? si j’avais détendu mes ressorts d’un seul cran, je n’ét[a]is plus maître de rien—Aussi je le resserrai au contraire, et je les resserrerai encore! Michel vivement ému fut obligé de faire une pause; mais il par[a]iss[a] it être impatient de se débarrasser de tout ce qui ét[a]it amoncelé dans sa tête. Il posa bientôt le doigt sur la boîte au miroir et continua e ainsi en prenant un ton solennel : — De là, et il montr[a]it la boîte, est sorti un rayon d’espérance, et la punition. Il exécuta ensuite avec les mains plusieurs mouvements, comme s’il eût arraché vivement quelque chose d’une place, pour en substituer une autre. — Comprenez-vous, me demanda-t-il? — Pas précisément. — Vous avez étudié la physique? — Oui, autrefois.

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— Alors vous n’ignorez pas que, bien que l’on ait trouvé le mouvement perpétuel, on a toujours les frottements et la destruction graduelle des matières contre soi? C’est aussi ce qui m’est arrivé; malheur! quand on ne peut plus mettre une roue neuve à la place de celle qui est usée! Souvenez-vous bien de cela—[À] neuf heures du soir—Mais… Nous y reviendrons! Michel ten[a]it toujours la boîte au miroir, qu’il se mit à baiser en pleurant. Après m’avoir fait approcher encore de lui, il me dit avec une effusion de coeur qui me toucha : — Puisque je vous ai fait conn[a]ître toutes mes fautes, tous mes chagrins, il est juste que je vous montre ce qui me reste d’un grand trésor. Ah! s’écria-t-il avec tendresse, si vous aviez connu Thérèse! C’ét[a]it mon bon ange tant qu’elle a vécu; mais elle est morte, et il ne m’en reste plus que cela. Michel fit un mouvement de tête à droite et à gauche comme pour s’assurer qu’aucun indiscret ne pourr[a]it nous surprendre, et me serrant dans ses bras : — Je veux, me dit-il, que vous la conn[a]issiez… vous êtes digne de la conn[a]ître. Alors il tira soigneusement le couvercle de la boîte, et par l’effet d’une curiosité bien naturelle, je portai précipitamment les yeux sur le miroir. J’aur[a]is dû m’y attendre; c’ét[a]it un morceau de métal assez brut, sur lequel je ne distinguai absolument rien. Mais dès que je vis, sur la figure de Michel, l’expression de tendresse et de béatitude ineffable qui y ét[a]it répandue, mon premier mouvement fut de consulter de nouveau le miroir en accusant mes eux. Ce redoublement d’attention anima Michel, qui, soulevant sa boîte et la considérant avec un léger balancement de tête semblable à celui d’un artiste devant son ouvrage, — Voyez, me dis[a]it-il, ses beaux cheveux châtains, ses yeux si doux et sa bouche qui sourit avec tant de bonté—Elle est bien pâle, mais elle est bien belle, n’est-ce pas? Et comme il indiqu[a]it de l’autre main les différentes parties d’un visage, j’observai avec quelle incroyable précision il détermin[a]it le rapport des traits entre eux. Je l’avouerai, à deux ou trois reprises, je me frottai[s] les yeux dans l’espérance de les rendre aussi clairvoyants que ceux du malade, mais il ne m’en laissa pas le temps. Michel av[a]it assez brusquement refermé la boîte, son front s’ét[a]it rembruni. — Croiriez-vous, reprit-il, que, pendant tout le temps de ma puissance, j’ai presque oublié cet ange, ma pauvre Thérèse? quand j’y ai repensé, je n’ét[a] is plus moi, j’ét[a]is gâté et j’ai gâté le souvenir de Thérèse. C’est dans ma caverne, quand je fus seul, bien triste, en exécration a tous, c’est lorsque je fus dégoûté de ce que je voy[a]is et de ce que j’entend[a]is dire dans mon petit

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monde, que j’ouvris alors cette boîte… mais devinez-vous l’idée qui me vint? Ah! Dieu ne me la pardonnera jamais!… Après avoir combiné et réuni mille et mile ressorts, je fis à son image… non pas une statue de bois ou de pierre au moins… mais presqu’une vrai Thérèse. Son port, sa taille, ses traits, toute sa personne se reproduisit sous ma main, et bientôt il n’y eut plus un seul mouvement que je ne pusse lui faire prendre. Mais ce n’ét[a]it pas assez pour moi, et je voul[a]is trouver pour mettre en elle un je ne sais quoi qui contrefit la vie. Nuit et jour je travaill[a]is sans relâche. Enfin j’en ét[a]is venu à ce point de donner de l’élasticité à l’un de ses bras. Déjà sa main s’ouvr[a]it pour prendre et retenir, et je lui présentai la mienne comme pour agacer la vie; elle la saisit et la serra. Pénétré de joie d’abord, je parlai[s] à Thérèse, croyant qu’elle allait me répondre; mais toute sa personne demeura fixe, excepté sa main qui serr[a] it la mienne avec tant de force, que je fis de vains efforts pour me dégager. Tout à coup j’entendis neuf heures sonner. C’ét[a]it l’instant où chaque soir j’étais obligé de renouveler la roue principale de la machine-mère. Arrêté par le bras, je regardai avec une anxiété croissante cette fatale roue qui, à mesure que ses dents s’u[s]aient, laiss[a]it prendre à tous les autres rouages qu’elle dev[a]it régler une vitesse épouvantable; je prévis alors l’horrible désordre qui all[a]it éclater au milieu de toutes les machines flottantes; je les voy[a]is déjà, rapides comme l’éclair, sillonner l’eau sans direction précise et se ruant avec fracas l’une contre l’autre. Epouvanté, Thérèse! m’écriai-je, Thérèse! quitte ma main! au nom du ciel! quitte ma main ou tout est perdu! Et je me débattis encore de manière à m’arracher les membres; mais prières, efforts, tout fut vain; Thérèse demeura immobile comme une tenaille. Alors je sentis qu’il ne rest[a]it plus d’espoir, et comme je jett[a]is un dernier regard sur l’infernale roue devenue si mince, si mince que je ne pouv[a]is plus la distinguer, il se fit un bruit de tonnerre épouvantable, puis au milieu d’une nuit profonde tout ce qui ét[a]it dans la caverne fut lancé dans le lac… Je ne sais plus… je ne me souviens plus… Ah! soutenez-moi! L’émotion de Michel pendant de récit l’av[a]it tellement épuisé, qu’en prononçant ces dernières paroles il se laissa tomber presque sans connaissance entre mes bras. Je fis signe au rameur de nous conduire à terre, où l’autre bateau ne tarda pas à nous rejoindre. Michel fut transporté chez lui, où, à peine arrivé, il demanda à se mettre au lit. On le coucha, un sommeil assez calme s’empara de lui, chose qui, dis[a]it-on, ne lui ét[a]it pas arrivée depuis longtemps. Quand nous le vîmes tranquille, nous allâmes raconter ce qui ven[a]it d’avoir lieu, ainsi que l’occasion première de la maladie de Michel, à un médecin des eaux de Matlock, qui nous conseilla de faire partir cet homme au plus tôt pour Londres, afin qu’il se trouvât le plus promptement possible avec ses parents et au milieu de ses compatriotes, où il n’entendr[a]it plus parler angl[a]is.

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— S’il y a chance de guérison pour lui, ajouta-t-il, c’est par l’effet de sa langue maternelle. Je m’entendis aussitôt avec la respectable famille angl[a]ise, qui, en ramenant Michel d’Amérique, s’ét[a]it encore chargée de remettre tout ce qu’il posséd[a]it à ses parents. On fit à l’instant même les préparatifs du départ, et il fut convenu que je voyager[a]is dans la même voiture que le malade. Tout étant disposé, j’allai le lendemain à cinq heures du matin prendre Michel. Il régnait un calme sur la physionomie et dans ses mouvements qui fut jugé d’un favorable augure, en effet, lorsque je lui parlai du départ, il obéit avec une entière docilité à tout ce que je lui conseillai de faire. Il parla peu, me regarda plusieurs fois en laissant échapper un sourire où perçait la tristesse et comme un espèce de honte; mais dès que tout fut prêt, il se mit en route sans faire la moindre observation. Pendant le voyage, j’eus soin de lui donner l’explication des choses plus simples qui s’offrirent à nos regards, afin de ramener son esprit peu à peu à la réalité. Pour lui[,] il resta toujours attentif, calme et silencieux; souvent il serr[a]it mes mains dans les siennes, mais sans rien dire. [À] dix heures du soir, nous étions à Londres, où Michel se trouva bientôt au milieu des personnes de sa famille. En peu de jours les progrès de sa raison furent assez sensibles pour que l’on conçût l’espérance d’une guérison, si non parfaite, du moins tranquillisante pour le bien-être du malade et le repos de sa famille. Les affaires d’intérêt réglées, Michel et les siens repassèrent en France. De retour moi-même dans mon pays, je reçus des nouvelles de Michel. On l’avait emmené à Gerardmer, dans les Vosges, son pays natal. Là son esprit s’ét[a]it tout-à-fait calmé, au milieu des soins tendres de sa famille. Il par[a]iss[a]it toujours un peu triste et ét[a]it habituellement fort silencieux. Quoiqu’il parût prendre plaisir à voir tous ceux qui lui prodigu[a]ient des soins, jamais cependant il n’a laissé juger qu’il les reconnût précisément pour ses amis d’enfance ou ses parents. Il aim[a]it à être seul, son plaisir ét[a]it de se promener sur les bords du lac de Gerardmer; son occupation consist[a]it à faire avec du bois et du fer des ouvrages d’une perfection rare, dont plusieurs font l’ornement du musée d’Epinal.

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Appendix 2 Delacroix, Géricault, and the Horse in the Chios

Here I explore another perspective on the horse in the Chios, one that considers its relation to previous depictions and especially to Géricault’s precedent. This argument runs parallel to the one I offer in Chapter 3. Delacroix painted horses throughout his career, but the Chios marked his first inclusion of a horse in a major Salon painting. Few discussions of his renditions of horses in the 1820s fail to compare his approach to Géricault’s, the artist whose oeuvre is so often identified with the representation of the horse.1 Géricault’s paintings, graphic work, and sculpture are flooded by the same unparalleled pitch of animalistic physical action, a wringing-out of subjectivity which characterizes all his work but seems to find a particularly perfect extremity of representation in his depictions of horses. But art-historical accounts that compare and contrast Delacroix and Géricault, invariably with the two artists’ depictions of horses a major plank of discussion, demur from acknowledging such extremity. The result is that these exercises, not to put too fine a point on it, miss the fundamental stakes involved. An essay by Johnson on the relationship between the two artists mentions Géricault’s “passion for riding” as biographical texture.2 On the other hand, Philippe Grunchec draws a one-to-one correspondence between the varying character of the horses Géricault depicted and the artist’s personal history.3 The singularity of the immersive intensity of Géricault’s work escapes acknowledgment. This isn’t surprising: a more searching discussion would render comparison-hunting of limited use, by raising the possibility that Géricault’s painting was hors pareil, and created a problem for his peers and the artists who came after him. The emulative dynamic of Crow’s work on the tradition of David has underlined this issue. Within Crow’s interpretive focus on David’s studio, Géricault’s Raft marks a brilliant summation and culmination of the Davidian tradition. According to Crow, the Raft, the fruit of a career spent outside the institutional system, also realizes the dream of the Davidian ideal at its most egalitarian—not least because in the Raft Géricault eventually achieved mastery of figure drawing, having found it impossible to dispense with what Crow sees as an essential training in Davidian draftsmanship.4 At the same time, Delacroix is described as connected to Géricault by fraternal bonds which forged earlier moments of originality in the chain of inheritance.5 In the case of Delacroix, the emulative dynamic isn’t kindled: Crow sees all of

62 Théodore Géricault Chasseur, 1812 Oil on canvas 11 ft. 5 in. × 8 ft. 9 in. PAR I S , M U S É E DU L O UV R E

63 Louis Boulanger Mazeppa, 1827 Oil on canvas 12 ft. 10 in. × 17 ft. 2 in. PARIS, M U SÉE D U LOU VRE

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Delacroix’s major paintings of the 1820s as derivative of the Raft. In this way, the changed circumstances of the 1820s prove problematic for Crow’s thesis. Even the most sophisticated approach that sets Géricault’s and Delacroix’s work together in something like a contest, construing them as two artists cut from the same cloth, winds up literally and in adjudicative terms putting Géricault first and Delacroix second. Crow describes the horse and rider in the Chios as an echo of Géricault’s Charging Chasseur (1812; Louvre): the figures of the Turk and the horse in the Chios become the “orientalized cousin” of the figures in the prior painting.6 The term “cousin” also underlines Crow’s genealogical approach. The point as I see it is not to enter Delacroix into a contest with Géricault. At this juncture the sarcastic question I quoted earlier assumes particular pertinence. The critic specifically pointed to the fact that Delacroix had effected the large vanishing act of making “the belly and rump” of the horse in the Chios disappear. Not only are these signifiers of equine power par excellence, but they are the very elements that invest the rearing horse in Géricault’s Chasseur with its stupendous sense of animalistic force and power (fig. 62).7 The very elements that a contemporary viewer saw vanish in Delacroix’s rearing horse and rider are emphasized in Géricault’s Chasseur. Yet the latter is a representation to which Delacroix’s rearing horse and rider in the Chios supposedly offers weak tribute.8 In fact, in Crow’s account the Chasseur is itself criticized. The Chasseur’s abundance of surface effects of brushwork and color deflects attention away from the lack of rigorous draftsmanship, which Géricault at that stage in his career was still forgoing. The same kind of compensatory reflex marks the Chios, according to Crow.9 But what is most relevant here is the dichotomy between the figure of the rider and the figure of the horse in the Chasseur. On the one hand, there is the mounted officer’s indifferent expression and insubstantial body, unconvincingly seated; and on the other hand, the rearing, massive rump of the horse from which the enormous sense of energy in this painting emanates. Crow’s criticism of the painting points this up, taking issue more with the inexpert rendering of the rider than with the depiction of the horse: the rider appears unconvincing precisely because he appears to Crow pasted on rather than in control of the powerful animal.10 All the more surprising, then, that Crow identifies the horse in the Chios as a derivative echo of the Chasseur, when Delacroix’s depiction dissolves the sense of a horse’s body that underlies the effect of Géricault’s horse. What happened between Géricault’s massive charger and Delacroix’s lightstepping horse? The question is best addressed by invoking a third example of a horse, painted three years after Delacroix’s. Louis Boulanger (1806–67),

a painter younger than Delacroix, was criticized by the critic for the Figaro at the “Salon of 1827” for his obvious, “hackneyed,” and “common” depiction of a horse and human figure (fig. 63).11 These criticisms were elicited because of what was seen as Boulanger’s overwrought evocation of the horse’s wildness, vested in his portrayal of particularly massive equine anatomy. Boulanger’s horse is placed in a pose virtually identical with the disposition of the rearing horse in the Chasseur. The rump of Boulanger’s horse looms in the foreground, and a number of effects enhance the emphasis on its rounded hindquarters. For example, the curved, straining backs of two figures lean toward the horse’s rump from each side. Over the course of a short description, the Figaro critic emphasized the overwrought, heavy-handed impression of frenzy conveyed by the painting. First, the critic said, the horse appeared in the throes of a tumultuous action: “the wild horse shudders and beats the ground with his hooves” and terrifies the figure on its back with its “stomping.” The horse appeared to the critic as simultaneously frantic and burly, an ungainly combination. The critic also found the main human figure less than persuasive, and the way in which he was drawn “a little negligent.” He dryly commented: “doubtless this man was [already] wounded by the horse’s stomping, so why does [the painter] still keep him so close [to the horse]?” In fact, the Figaro critic said, the human figure was nothing less than “a hackneyed foil.” Moreover, he went on, the entire “theme is perhaps not very good.” He ended his commentary by condemning the painting’s threadbare approach: “M. Boulanger must feel the worthlessness of these common devices.”12 In short, this kind of reaction to Boulanger’s depiction suggests that by 1827 a certain threshold of acceptability had been crossed in terms of pursuing a strategy informed—to say the least—by Géricault. Boulanger’s painting seems characterized at the minimum by an attempt to recapture the mix of elements that contribute to the Chasseur’s effect. But Boulanger’s painting courts a caricatured—“hackneyed”—sense of physicality. It was not possible simply to follow or continue Géricault’s matchless force, and so it stands to reason that the relation between Géricault and Delacroix is necessarily a complicated one. But the scholarship on Delacroix retains traces of a disappointment with what tends to be seen as his relinquishing of that intensity. Delacroix’s horses are judged as a litmus test of this: the “orientalized cousin” in the Chios, along with other examples of horses that appeared to Johnson as “clumsy homages” to Géricault.13 There can be no approach to Delacroix’s work that can avoid accounting for the nature of his relationship to Géricault, but that endeavor should take the measure of each artist on both sides of the relationship. Boulanger’s painting has still more to tell us about the context for Delacroix’s horse in the Chios. The particular subject Boulanger chose to depict—the wild

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story of Mazeppa—could not be more directly relevant to my argument. This legend was, to quote Patricia Mainardi, especially “popular among French Romantic artists.”14 Prior to Boulanger’s The Agony of Mazeppa, Mazeppa had been the subject of a number of works, by Géricault in 1823 and Delacroix in 1824. The subject offers an extraordinary opportunity to have a horse command the painting: it invites pictures outlandishly freighted in favor of equine power. Delacroix’s version of the Mazeppa narrative has, I think, exact and intriguing parallels with the depiction of the horse in the Chios, and it tells us a great deal about Delacroix’s approach to the representation of the horse in the 1820s— why it carried particular significance for him, and why it developed in the way it did.15 Byron’s poem Mazeppa, published in 1819, emphasizes a putative episode from the youth of the Ukrainian nobleman and hero Ivan Stepanovyeh Mazeppa (1644–1709), when he was punished for adultery with the wife of a Polish count. His sentence was an unusual kind of execution. He was strapped nude to the back of a wild horse, which was then released into the Ukrainian wilderness to run wild until it died of exhaustion.16 The subject offers a ne plus ultra of untrammeled equine force with the human figure at the mercy of his mount. Different moments from the tale were chosen by the three painters. Neither Géricault nor Delacroix selected the moment that Boulanger depicted. Boulanger set his scene at the beginning of the story, the point when Mazeppa is lashed to the horse by his executioners. Boulanger’s composition is dominated by this scene, which is placed in the foreground. Four smaller figures, the aggrieved count, who remains seated, and three standing judges, look down on the turmoil from a spatially ambiguous platform. (Depicted directly behind and just above the heads of the foreground group, they look like an inserted cameo of four smaller figures.) Three main figures in the foreground hold down the wriggling figure of Mazeppa and tie him to the horse.17 The Figaro’s critic recoiled at the torrential emotion that the principals seem to pour into their appointed roles, an excess facilitated by Boulanger’s choice of the moment of initial terror, which has each figure unleash an extreme degree of energy.18 The figure of Mazeppa appeared frightened out of his wits, reduced to a “hackneyed foil” (his head juts bolt upright to show his terrified expression), and goaded to a pitch of frenzy, the horse strains to take off at the gallop, rearing up almost as steeply as Géricault’s horse in the Chasseur.19 In fact, the tension between Boulanger’s use of this pose for the horse and the necessity of depicting Mazeppa’s exceptional execution can both be seen. Mazeppa is held down flat on his back while he is trussed to the horse, yet the horse is rearing. The

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dichotomy between the two poses is marked by the improbable, compensating swell of Mazeppa’s chest: a bloated, egg-shaped curve that obscures the lower lip of his wide-open mouth. Boulanger’s executioners strain fiercely and bend forward, pulling the ropes tight around the body of Mazeppa. It was this kind of exertion, extreme and unjustified, that bothered the Figaro critic. Géricault produced a small painting based on the subject of Mazeppa in 1823 (fig. 64). There is also a later lithograph with a similar composition, on which he collaborated with the artist Eugène Lami (1800–90). Delacroix produced a small oil sketch and gouache, both entitled Mazeppa (the gouache is shown in fig. 65). Géricault and Delacroix were both drawn to the end of story, the final stages of Mazeppa’s tempestuous ride.20 In Géricault’s painting and lithograph the figure of Mazeppa is plastered against the horse’s back, depicted in a spread-eagled pose. His arms are so stretched out by the ropes fastening him to the horse that his hands join under the horse’s chin and his arms form a collar clasped around the horse’s neck. Curving under Mazeppa’s body is the horse, who appears exhausted and struggles mightily to traverse forbidding terrain. It has just crossed a body of water. (Byron’s poem mentions how Mazeppa is carried through a “bright broad river’s gushing tide.”21) Both the small painting and the lithograph show the horse emerging on the other side of the water. Not only is its human burden heavy, but even the water looks heavy. The body of water depicted in Géricault’s painting and lithograph seems to be more than a stream. It appears swollen and rises high against its banks. In both pictures a long, heavy mane clings to the horse’s bowed neck and hangs over its eyes, suggesting that the mane is sodden and streaming, and that the animal must have been engulfed as it waded through the water. In both pictures, its tail still hangs in the water. Only the horse’s front legs are visible: its rear legs are still swallowed by the river. In the lithograph, the water laps opaque and soupy around the top of its rear legs. In the painting, the water is rendered in broad, horizontal bands that thicken in places into ribbons of white impasto. Géricault used an unusual shade of blue, indigo and steely.22 If a major component of Géricault’s Mazeppa is the horse’s laden, boneweary exhaustion, then Delacroix’s versions of the narrative, while also focusing on the final stages of Mazeppa’s ordeal, convey a very different impression. This is especially true of the gouache (fig. 65), which suggests a distinct interpretation of how Mazeppa’s journey neared its end. (In this sense Johnson is not accurate when he says that both artists focused on the same point in the story in analogous ways.23) To begin, Delacroix’s paintings contain no river, no topographical details. In both the oil sketch and the gouache the landscape is emphatically flat, a broadly painted sweep of plain.24 Delacroix does not paint the horse’s surroundings as a neutral foil for the central animal.

64 Théodore Géricault Mazeppa, 1823 Oil on paper applied to canvas 8 in. × 11 in. P R I VATE C O L L E C T I O N

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65 Eugène Delacroix Mazeppa, 1824 Pen, ink, and gouache on paper 9 in. × 1 ft. 1 in. AT E N EU M ART M U SEU M , HELSINKI

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In the oil sketch, for example, the landscape provides a source of amelioration and relief for the figures of Mazeppa and the horse. This is due to a narrative detail painted in the background, and the sky also brightens in the distance. The background contains the small, sketchily painted, but unmistakable rendition of what Johnson describes as a “band of horses, who, arriving from the right at a great gallop, and probably coming to rejoin their fellow steed, announce the arrival of the Cossacks.”25 (In the narrative, although the horse finally falls dead from exhaustion, the beleaguered Mazeppa is eventually rescued.26) Thus in his oil sketch Delacroix adds a crucial redemptive feature which alters the viewer’s response to the impression of the exhausted horse in the foreground. It might appear at first that Delacroix’s gouache Mazeppa pursues an alternative approach to his oil painting of the same name (see fig. 65). There is no saving detail, no obvious rescue party. The moment depicted in Delacroix’s oil painting is clearly proleptic: a future, triumphant event in the story of Mazeppa is built into the picture. The gouache also seems to inscribe a finality about the outcome of Mazeppa’s journey, although not a happy one. Now,

in the other versions of Mazeppa by Géricault, as well as in Delacroix’s oil painting of the subject, the figure on the horse, although strapped down, is depicted at an upright angle. The horse perseveres with its burden and moves onward. In Delacroix’s gouache, however, Mazeppa’s body is depicted on a downward slope, and the horse’s legs give way and crumple to the ground. Exhaustion, legs that buckle, a fall forward: there seems to be little doubt that the horse depicted in Delacroix’s gouache is at the limit of its endurance. Or is it? Yet again signifiers of equine feeling are put in place but remain unfortified by their anticipated meanings. The horse appears to share an unsteady temperament and lack of mass with the horse in the Chios.27 It is slighter than the sturdy horse in the oil study. This horse appears so light, even boneless—and this is not simply a benefit of the watercolor medium— that its collapse seems as much the result of its own unsteadiness as the burden Mazeppa supposedly represents. And Delacroix’s figure of Mazeppa hardly presents much of a burden. Whereas the figure of Mazeppa in Géricault’s picture seemed to twist against the horse, his arms collaring its neck—a trussed, chafing weight—the figure of Mazeppa depicted in Delacroix’s gouache seems settled quite comfortably, given the circumstances. Gazing straight up at the sky, Delacroix’s Mazeppa lies flat, arms tucked under the small of his back and legs hanging down, bent at the knee. Nothing interrupts the focus on the sense of the horse’s movement—far from it. The figure of Mazeppa entirely complements the animal’s particular, listing slant: set at a downward but slight angle, Mazeppa seems to slide gradually forward on the horse’s back. The horse keels over in a bemused rather than an anguished fashion, its large eyes cast downward and wide open. The Mazeppa gouache does not inscribe either a persuasive impression of the horse’s final hour or a general impression of finality. The landscapes in Géricault’s versions of the Mazeppa story are bleak. The horse appears swamped by a degree of difficulty figured most obviously by the swollen river. Tension is instilled in the scene: can the horse, brutalized by its journey, surpass another obstacle? In the lithograph, for example, the horse struggles out of the water and up the river bank, battling gravity and its own exhaustion—that mane in its eyes—as it strains to clamber up what is after all the gentle incline of the river’s bank. (Byron’s lines call it “the repelling bank.”28) But note how far outstretched is the left front leg of Géricault’s horse in the painting and the lithograph. It juts a good distance out in front of the horse’s chest as the animal anchors itself in order to heave the rest of its body onto dry land. The narrative calls for the horse to eventually collapse of exhaustion. Géricault’s horse is flagging, but the viewer is not given a shred of evidence to suggest that, for this particular moment at least, the animal is anything but

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indomitable. The resolute front leg signals the animal’s redoubtable ability to take another, and then another heavy step forward. In Delacroix’s paintings of the subject, the landscape and setting for the figures of Mazeppa and the horse are not invested with this degree of difficulty. The wide, dark plain in Delacroix’s oil sketch Mazeppa might look inhospitable, but that suggestion is neutralized by the arriving Cossacks. A less obvious interplay of landscape and figures is found in the gouache and in the Chios. But in all three works, although very different, we see Delacroix exploring, I think, the expressive potential of—and I want to say also the ameliorative possibility of—a relation between horse and landscape. In respect to the horses in the Chios and the Mazeppa gouache it is not the landscape as backdrop that is explored (as it is in the Mazeppa oil sketch), but rather the elements of landscape and atmospheric effects: the expanse and textures of sky, plain, and horizon. Both the Chios and the Mazeppa gouache, dating from the same year, feature a flat, vast landscape with—and these are the vital features for the Chios—an emphatic horizon line and huge sky. The figure of the horse in each painting interrupts this line. Of small matter in the compositionally simple gouache—two figures, horse and passenger, set on a plain and against the sky—this interruption is significant in the Chios. As Grimaldo Grigsby has noted, the horse’s head along with its rider are the only figural elements in the populous, complicated Chios to break what she calls the “oppressive lid of the horizon.”29 As I have stressed, the majority of the painting is not occupied by figures: sky and landscape fill no less than approximately two-thirds of the canvas. It is not so much in terms of the gouache’s sky, but rather in the interplay between the horse and the flat, empty plain stretching out around it that we see the kind of interaction between horse and context that Delacroix was attempting in the horse in the Chios. The gouache’s light and pale hues—blues in the sky, light siena in the horse’s body—are darkened by indigo and dark brown areas, brushed using horizontal strokes, into the sky, the horizon line, and the foreground. A shaft of light yellow lightens the foreground and seems to catch the horse’s hooves in its trail, kindling patches of color as the horse falls, or rather teeters to one side. The animal is depicted on a broken arc of color, with the greatest amount of color concentrated in a thin diamond in the right front foreground. Broken into smaller diamonds by brown stripes, it appears in the original as a trellised lozenge of yellow. What is the effect of the arc of color? Clearly the Mazeppa gouache and the Chios do not proffer the kind of information readily yielded by his recourse to narrative—those arriving rescuers—in the oil sketch Mazeppa. But the broken

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arc is instrumental in the gouache’s mood. Its effect rests on a suspension of any immediate assumption of the horse’s impending death, patently the outcome of the narrative.30 This opens a delay or lag in the perception of the image, what I am calling a supplementary space. A number of links are created between horse and landscape that contribute to the impression of delay. First, there is the role played by the arc overall in relation to the fall of the horse. The sweeping arc seems to catch the horse’s hooves in its trail, kindling patches of color. But it is also the case that the hooves seem to interrupt and snare the progress of the arc as it curves across the immediate foreground. These effects are two sides of the same coin of delay: the horse’s collapse seems to be slowed down and partially arrested. Second, there is the awkward posture of the horse’s back leg. The left rear leg of the Mazeppa’s horse kicks backwards, but it is also bent sharply at the knee, so that it seems tightly tucked in—except for the hoof’s backward kick. The hoof of this leg is less defined than the two front hooves, but more vivid. On the one hand the hoof of the horse’s left rear leg reads as a flake of yellow cut out in the dark foreground, a satellite of the latticed lozenge of yellow, and the linchpin of the arc’s progress across the landscape. But it is also the element that defines the awkward movement of the back left leg. And the tilting zigzag falter of the back leg sharpens and sets the sense of the horse’s unsteady, sideways slant, which is a major reason for the lag in seeing the expected death of the exhausted horse as it collapses. (The same outcome is held off in the oil sketch, but by the interpolation of a narrative element.) These features can be considered together with the effects of interchange between the horse in the Chios and its surrounding passages that I explore in Chapter 3. As I note there, the Chios offers a family of examples of atmospheric brushwork and extremes of handling that produce effects of lag or delay. The presiding spirit in the Mazeppa gouache is migratory. When scattered parts reveal a correspondence, it means that the qualities of one portion have drifted into another part of the painting, even to the point of setting up an affective bond between them. It has become evident that when Delacroix depicts a horse, he is particularly concerned with these processes: the figure of the horse does not stay in one place, so to speak, because Delacroix ties its depiction to the landscape in some way. This connection produces a lag in perception and works mainly by migration. And at this point I can specify the character of the migration between horse and landscape: one of its principal mechanisms is porosity. This effect of porosity holds rich explanatory value because it addresses the precise difficulties of the depiction of the horse in the Chios. Everything we have seen—the depletion of density and mass, the unsteadiness of disposition, the

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light-stepping gait and general delicacy, and also the sudden shafts of light and dark—all these features depend on a certain permeability and dissemination of means. So much so, that the sense of the horse’s body evaporated completely for at least two critics: although it bears no less than two figures and is the brunt of the lunging figure, the horse’s body is lost in a velvety expanse of black. Its weightless burden plays a part in these effects: even if she were not ambiguously suspended, there is no horse’s back available to support the nude. How can the horse even support itself, Thiers wondered. In fact the simpler composition of the Mazeppa gouache brings out the impossibility of the relation: Mazeppa is also a figure bound to a horse, devoid of the welter of forms that surrounds the horse in the Chios. But Mazeppa appears as another unaccountably lightened load: the hapless captive is featured as a reclining passenger. The figure of the horse is host to effects of drift and porosity, with measures taken to disinvest it of a secured focus or even a secure footing. The horse is not simply undermined: strategies of migration direct the flow, and the figure of the horse and the landscape are linked. Its representation is partly mapped into other elements, principally effects of light, color, and atmosphere. An affective bond is formed in which the crucial effect is one of delay. The link between horse and landscape has been my main theme in this section, but the subsidiary theme is the effect of delay and how it works. Why is it that Delacroix felt compelled to embark on these strategies: linking the figure to the landscape through these particular means, and in ways that effect an interruption in the action? In previous sections I discussed effects of delay in other figures in the Chios. But in these figures there was not the same link to the landscape, nor the same strategies of migration: these effects develop, or develop with particular intensity, when Delacroix turns his attention to the representation of a horse. Why are these strategies effected using a figure of a horse? As I said, it matters greatly that the sense of the horse’s physical mass is so destabilized, given the proverbial stability and density that horses were invested with in earlier painting. That this horse works in a different way testifies, I think, to the importance of Géricault for Delacroix. Delacroix found himself unable to inherit the solutions that had made Géricault’s painting possible. Delacroix’s evacuation of equine signifiers is a radical intervention, which is pointed in respect to Géricault, whose representation of an animal physicality is at the heart of his work. I have brought out the degree of divergence between the two painters, and the problems that arose when elements of Géricault’s approach were pursued by painters who, in short, weren’t Géricault, as in the case of Boulanger’s Mazeppa. I have emphasized the horse’s extraordinary restlessness with, or more precisely in, its temporal and spatial placement in the Chios and the ways that landscape and horse create delay and lags.

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The effect of porosity, and the engagement with Géricault (seen in Delacroix’s works that are based on the subject of Mazeppa, and also in the Chios) encompass increasingly radical consequences, and they can be seen to culminate in the vanishing of the horse’s belly and rump in the Chios. Up to now I have been concentrating on a description of the phenomenon of the dissolving horse. I have been asking, in effect, how porosity, migration, and delay function in Delacroix’s depictions. But what kind of meaning can be attached to these inventions? I think the potential of these strategies appeared greatest to Delacroix when the permeability or porosity of form, combined with the promise of a migration or drift of elements, could open an affective bond between the figure of the horse and something else, some other element. The Chios’s background provides a vast spreading expanse, perhaps too spreading: while the connective link between horse and landscape achieved in the Mazeppa gouache depended on the qualities of the landscape—the depicted plain and the plight of the horse—that link stayed close to home. It did not stray far from the body of the horse. In the Chios, however, forms could not but be widely dispersed: it is as if they were daunted by the painting’s vast aerial field, leaving resonances which thin out and wane. The strange inventions I have been analyzing—the resonances between smoke and mane and so on—are increasingly strained affective bonds. Somehow Delacroix found it necessary to tie the horse to the landscape in a way that compromised the horse. The strange diminution and lightness of forms in this sense, understood as part of the difficulty of responding to Géricault, are also foisted on the horse by the scale of its location, with the dainty head and hazy mane seeking communion with the great sky, and the rearing body plunged in shadow underneath a welter of figures. Let us not forget, finally, that the horse in the Sardanapalus appeared in the same Salon as Boulanger’s Mazeppa. The flailing, beautiful, dying horse in the Sardanapalus, with only its neck, head, and remarkable, wounded chest visible, is opposed, in impulse and expression, to Boulanger’s animal. The way Delacroix’s horse is depicted refuses Boulanger’s thundering—“stomping” and “shuddering” to quote the critic for the Figaro—interpretation of the wild horse, which pounded Géricault’s physicality of representation into a counterfeit of the animal’s indomitable, instinctual body. Mainardi has stressed the overall success of Boulanger’s painting at the 1827 Salon: the 23-year-old artist won a medal, and Mainardi emphasizes that his Mazeppa became immediately and strongly identified with romanticism. She quotes Baudelaire’s discussion of Boulanger in his “Salon of 1845” in support of this. But in this quotation Baudelaire specifically refers to the “last ruins of the old romanticism” in Boulanger’s work. In his discussion of Boulanger in his “Salon

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of 1845” Baudelaire is looking back on the trajectory of Boulanger’s career, which he said began with his Mazeppa and declined thereafter. Boulanger’s main contributions to the Salon by 1845 were sorry indeed—Baudelaire calls them “detestable” and “mediocre”—but according to Baudelaire, Mazeppa’s wild ride led straight to them: “this is the abyss to which the unbridled course of Mazeppa has led.”31 In this sense Boulanger echoes the precipitous fall of Sigalon and points up the extremely restricted resources of the disabled traditions of unified action in the 1820s, which saw these young painters unable to fully follow up on their initial Salon success, in retrospect paintings that eked out temporary, compromised, and contingent solutions.32 The figures of Delacroix’s horses, in the Chios, the Sardanapalus, and in the works based on the Mazeppa legend, show with a certain piercing exactitude the difficulty of Delacroix’s relation to Géricault in the 1820s. As we have seen in Chapter 3, components arise—a plume of smoke, a crest of mane, exuberant tasseling, a trellised lozenge of yellow—different in kind and yet each one connected to the expected focus of the horse’s body. In these elements I have traced Delacroix’s restlessness with vesting a centrality of effects in the horse as an indivisible body. He explored strategies of delay, generating perceptual lags that I have identified as dependent on the effect of porosity. It is as if the matchless physicality of Géricault could not be directly addressed, but had to be endlessly dispersed. This engagement helps account for why the horse in the Chios veers quite so much in the direction of qualities of delicacy, insubstantiality, and diminution (for example, the evaporation of the body, that strange, snub head). It is almost as if this were the necessary distance that Delacroix had to go, directly away from his sense of Géricault. But the horse in the Sardanapalus, undaunted by a vast sky, achieves a heightened development of porous effects (see fig. 3). In Delacroix’s approach to the figure of horse, the locus for expression increasingly migrates into areas and parts: the head and its physiognomy, the chest, the rearing hooves—into tributaries of details both animate and inanimate. Much the same was said in 1865 by the critic Philippe Burty (1830–90), who identified the most distinctive and characteristic elements of Delacroix’s particular approach to the horse as his treatment of the “shifting facets” of the head and chest, and the sense of detailing.33 That is the essence of the argument I have been making about Géricault: for Delacroix, extremities and details in the horse are invested with an abundance of expressive potential, because they had to be, in the wake of Géricault. The about-face from Géricault’s practice is fascinating. I think it corrects some previous accounts, which are perhaps too simple in their genealogy of forms; but what has kept me on this track is the outlandish effect that resulted. Delacroix’s idiosyncratic, almost perverse response to Géricault

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produced a new kind of affective matrix, made porous, spread across large portions of the canvas, dispersed—and the result is a new kind of temporal delay, a supplementary space, which works together with the ones I have been chronicling in previous pages.

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Notes to Chapter 1

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

Beth S. Wright, “Painting Thoughts: An Introduction to Delacroix,” in The Cambridge Companion to Delacroix, ed. Beth S. Wright (Cambridge, 2001), 4. Wright quotes the curator Paul Jamot: “C’est un nom illustre, c’est un grand nom, ce n’est pas un nom populaire.” Paul Jamot, in Centenaire du romantisme: Exposition Eugène Delacroix, exhibition catalog (Paris, 1930), 11. Jamot’s remark is also quoted in Barthélémy Jobert, Delacroix, trans. Terry Grabar and Alexandra Bonfante-Warren (Princeton, 2000), 7. According to Crow, the lack of skill among younger painters at the beginning of the 1820s did not temper their impatient ambition to launch themselves as major painters at the Salon with large-scale, swiftly executed works. Displays of brushwork and color thus reflect, in Crow’s account, a dissimulation of the figure-drawing skills that Delacroix and his peers had impetuously foregone. Partaking of a new bravura spirit abroad in handling, the “gestural colorism of the 1820s generation” (i.e., Delacroix, Sigalon, and other members of the nouvelle école) jettisoned a Davidian training, including the rite of passage at the Villa Medici. With the waning of the custom of going to Rome, “the young artist came away with few routines on which to rely, a diminished fund of concrete knowledge once so patently, even subliminally absorbed over years of artistic exercise among the monuments of Italy.” Thomas Crow, Emulation: The Making of Artists for Revolutionary France (New Haven, 1995), 222. The role played by the Liberty in the July Revolution has received concentrated attention from Michael Marrinan and Clark; Grimaldo Grigsby has given the Algiers a close reading too. T.J. Clark, The Absolute Bourgeois: Artists and Politics in France 1848–1851 (London, 1973), 124–44; Michael Marrinan, Painting Politics for Louis-Philippe: Art and Ideology in Orléanist France, 1830–1848 (New Haven, 1987); and Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby, “Orients and Colonies: Delacroix’s Algerian Harem,” in The Cambridge Companion, 69–87. Jack J. Spector, The Murals of Eugène Delacroix at Saint-Sulpice (New York, 1967); Michèle Hannoosh, Painting and the Journal of Eugène Delacroix (Princeton, 1995); and “Delacroix as Essayist: Writings on Art,” in The Cambridge Companion, 154–69. Michael Fried, Manet’s Modernism, or, the Face of Painting in the 1860s (Chicago, 1996), 268–9, 274–5. See also Nina Athanassoglou-Kallmyer, “Cézanne and Delacroix’s Posthumous Reputation,” Art Bulletin, 87 (Mar. 2005): 111–13. Udo Kultermann, “Fantin-Latour’s Hommage à Delacroix and the Formation of Homage Painting,” Konsthistorisk Tidskrift, 48 (Spring 1979): 31. Sharing a renewed awareness of the hierarchy of genres, this group set their hopes on the development of a new kind of portraiture, most of all, group portraiture. Fantin turned away from his successful, but historically conventional, single-figure compositions toward the complicated figurative arrangements of the Homage and other

8.

9.

10. 11. 12. 13.

14.

15.

16.

17.

demanding projects of the early 1860s. Fried, Manet’s Modernism, 198–222, 274–9. The existence of this group, whose company was crucial for Manet’s development, was identified for the first time by Fried. Ibid., 7–9, 185. Essential references include Fried, Absorption and Theatricality (Chicago, 1980), 78–82, 89–91; Courbet’s Realism (Chicago, 1990), 236–8; and Manet’s Modernism, 267–70, 413–5. Martha Ward has traced the reconfigurations of the tableau as it evolved away from the autonomous, single image amid changing contexts, expectations, and audiences in the wake of impressionism—an evolution that was at the same time a reclamation of its earlier transcendent promise as grand public painting. See Martha Ward, Pissarro, Neo-Impressionism and the Spaces of the Avant-Garde (Chicago, 1996), 4–8, 19–23, 89–104, 202–40. Ibid., 234–5; 269. Ibid., 269. Fried, “Painting Memories: On the Containment of the Past in Baudelaire and Manet,” Critical Inquiry, 10 (Mar. 1984): 512–22. See also Ralph Ubl’s very detailed accounts of several paintings, including the Jewish Wedding, which are part of a work in progress on Delacroix. Ubl’s interest in Fried makes his account divergent from this one, although many points are compatible. See Ubl, “Delacroix’s Jewish Wedding and the Medium of Painting,” Judaism and Christian Art, eds. Herbert Kessler and David Nirenberg (Philadelphia, 2011), 359–88; also “Eugène Delacroix: Von der Freiheit zur ästhetischen Gemeinschaft,” Bilder und Gemeinschaften: Studien zur Konvergenz von Politik und Ästhetik in Kunst, Literatur und Theorie, eds. Marcus Klammer et al. (Berlin, 2011), 273–313. “[I]nvoquons l’autorité du genie haut et clair d’Eugène Delacroix.” Paul Signac, D’Eugène Delacroix à neoimpressionnisme (Paris, 1899), 26. Signac’s treatise was originally published in feuilleton form in La Revue blanche in 1898. For its publishing history, see Charles Harrison and Paul Wood, eds., Art in Theory, 1900–2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas (Oxford, 2003), 15. Ward, describing the rapid “patenting” of Neo-Impressionist technique as a “group style,” has identified and traced the increasing subjugation of gesture to immateriality and ocularity in Neo-Impression. Signac’s conceptualization of an “impersonal body of knowledge” went still further in removing individuality from Neo-Impressionism. Ward, Pissarro, 94, 111. “On pourrait facilement constater que les teintes les plus fraîches et les plus délicates des chairs sont produites par de grosse hachures.” Signac, 41. “Le corsage orange-rouge de la femme couchée à gauche à des doublures bleu-vert: ces surfaces, de teintes complémentaires, s’exaltent et s’harmonisent, et ce contraste favorable donne à ces étoffes un éclat

et un lustre intense.” Ibid., 36–7. 18. “L’effet tragique du Naufrage de Don Juan est dû à une dominante vert glauque foncé, assourdie par des noirs lugubres; la note funèbre d’un blanc, éclatant sinistrement parmi tout ce sombre, complète cette harmonie de désolation.” Ibid., 39–40. 19. Charles Baudelaire, “Salon of 1846,” in trans. and ed. Jonathan Mayne, Art in Paris 1845–1862 (London, 1964), 65. 20. Bann identified the persistence of inherited verdicts on Paul Delaroche and his peers—in which Léon Rosenthal was himself inheriting opinions from Théophile Gautier. This shunted Delaroche’s highly pictorial interpretations of historical subject matter into the temporizing and collective style of the despised juste milieu, a categorization reactivated by Stephen Eisenman. Anne Larue’s discussion of French art-historical scholarship of the first half of the twentieth century—for example, André Joubin and Maurice Sérullaz—is also relevant here. Stephen Bann, Paul Delaroche: History Painted (Princeton, 1997), 26–9, 115–6; Léon Rosenthal, La Peinture romantique (Paris, 1914); Anne Larue, “Delacroix and his Critics: Stakes and Strategies,” in Art Criticism and Its Institutions in Nineteenth-Century France, ed. Michael R. Orwicz (Manchester, 1994), 63–87; and Stephen F. Eisenman, “The Generation of 1830 and the Crisis in the Public Sphere,” in Nineteenth–Century Art: A Critical History, ed. Eisenman (London, 1994), 204–21. 21. An illuminating application of Rosenthal is Pontus Grate’s attribution of a very brief lifespan to French Romantic painting. According to Grate, this movement began in the 1824 Salon and ended in the 1831 Salon. Grate also repeats the opinion that the nouvelle école of 1824 was subsumed—Delacroix excepted—by the juste milieu. By the same token, discussions of works by Delacroix that date from after the period 1831 tend not to affix them to an arc of development that begins with the large Salon entries of the 1820s. Further examples of this asymmetry are found in the preference for slicing into Delacroix’s oeuvre in order to concentrate on singular paintings: these discussions tend to demur from making connections between works and do not support larger assessments. Pontus Grate, Deux Critiques d’art de l’époque romantique: Gustave Planche et Théophile Thoré (Stockholm, 1959), 1–70. For a discussion that concentrates on works painted after 1831, see Stéphane Guégan, Delacroix et les Orientales (Paris, 1994). 22. Crow, “Classicism in Crisis: Gros to Delacroix,” in Nineteenth–Century Art, 55–7. 23. Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer (Cambridge MA, 1992), 22. 24. See Bann’s discussion of the twentieth-century tendency to seize upon a variety of arresting or shocking works of art—including canvases by Manet—as turning points, decisive breaks, or “watersheds.” Bann, Ways Around Modernism (New York, 2007), 45–51. 25. Selected references include Walter Benjamin, “Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century,” in Reflections, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York, 1978), 148–55; and Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capital, trans. Harry Zohn (London, 1973); Nicholas Green and Frank Mort, “Visual Representation and Cultural Politics,” Block Reader in Visual Culture, ed. George Robertson (London, 1996), 226–41; Clark on Baudelaire as the “poet of spleen” in The Absolute Bourgeois: Artists and Politics in France, 1848–1851 (London, 1973), 175; and modernist painting’s failed “mapping” in Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and His Followers (Princeton, 1984), 49, 63–78; Clement Greenberg, “Modernist Painting,” in Clement

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26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35.

36.

37.

38.

39.

Greenberg, The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 4, ed. John O’Brian (Chicago, 1993), 85–93; and the analysis of the latter in Fried, Manet’s Modernism, 13–19. Greenberg, “Avant-Garde Attitudes: New Art in the Sixties,” in Collected Essays, 295. Greenberg, “Review of an Exhibition of Eugène Delacroix,” in ibid., 243. This remark crops up in a contrast made between Delacroix and Picasso’s careers. Greenberg, “Picasso at Seventy-Five,” in ibid., 29. Baudelaire, Art in Paris, 65. Fried, “Painting Memories,” 519–21. Hal Foster, “Archives of Modern Art,” October, 99 (Winter 2002): 82. Fried, “Painting Memories,” 514–16, 522. Baudelaire, Art in Paris, 65. Ibid. Alphonse Rabbe regretted that Delacroix hadn’t been able to “show us victims that looked” as though they were “a little fatter,” especially the Chios’s older female figures who seemed “fleshless” (M. Delacroix ne pourrait-il nous montrer des victims plus intérassantes, plus fraîches, plus belles, plus grasses; des hommes mieux tournés, des vieilles moins décharnées?). Alphonse Rabbe, “Salon de 1824,” Le Courrier français, 253, 9 Sep. 1824, 3. In his review for the Globe (the second of the publications for which he reviewed the “Salon of 1824”), Adolphe Thiers picked out figures which he found especially compelling: “[h]ere [we see] a young mother” and “there [is] an old woman who looks terrified as the cuthroats approach” (Ici une jeune mere est étendue morte, et un enfant suce encore sa mamelle; là une vieille femme regarde avec effroi accourir des égorgeurs). Thanks to Marie-Claude Chaudonneret, Thiers’s three reviews of the 1824 Salon are now found between the covers of one scrupulously assembled volume. All references to writings by Thiers in 1824 come from this source. Thiers, “Salon de 1824,” Le Globe, 7, 28 Sep. 1824, in Adolphe Thiers, Critique d’art: Salons de 1822 et de 1824, ed. M.C. Chaudonneret (Paris, 2005), 206. Gotlieb, “Creation and Death in the Romantic Studio,” in Inventions of the Studio: Renaissance to Romanticism, eds. Michael Cole and Mary Pardo (Durham NC, 2005), 147–84. Both artists were working on their entries for the forthcoming Salon; Cogniet was then enjoying a run of initial career success (for example, he had won the Prix de Rome in 1817). A comprehensive account of Cogniet’s work as a painter, as well as discussions of his influence as a teacher, is found in Léon Cogniet (1794–1880), exhibition catalog (Orléans, 1990). Cogniet’s small paintings from his stay at the Villa Medici are discussed in Rooms With A View: The Open Window in the Nineteenth Century, exhibition catalog (New York, 2011), 8, 96. “Mercredi 12 [mai, 1824]: Cogniet est venu vers 3 h. passées.—il m’a paru fort content de ma peinture. Il lui semblait voir, disait-il, un ancien tableau commence, et puis combien le pauvre Géricault aimerait cette peinture! La vieille, sans bouche grande ouverte ni exagération dans les yeux.” Ed. Michèle Hannoosh, Journal d’Eugène Delacroix, vol. 1 (Paris, 2009), 160. For example, the light-filled face of a young girl with tied-up hair which dominates the daylit setting portrayed in Young Girl in a Cemetery, a painting which accompanied the Chios to the “Salon of 1824” (fig. 24). Although painted with creamy, quickly applied, long brushstrokes which appear most unlike the characteristically stubbier marks Géri-

40. 41.

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47. 48.

cault preferred, this crisp profile of 1824 harks back to the Raft’s inclusion of an angled profile set against the horizon, especially since Géricault’s earlier depiction includes partly open lips outlined against a background sky (albeit in an entirely different tonal register). A further example of Delacroix’s exploration of this upturned face is a study for the clean-shaven apostle depicted in the bottom righthand corner of The Virgin of the Sacred Heart (1820) where we see a broadly brushed-in, warmly colored approach. See Claude Pétry, ed., Delacroix: La Naissance d’un Nouveau Romantisme, exhibition catalog (Rouen, 1998), 85; and Sylvie Forestier, ed., Delacroix: Peintures et dessins d’inspiration religieuse, exhibition catalog (Nice, 1986), 15, cover. Hal Foster, “Archives of Modern Art,” 82. Crow’s discussion of Delacroix’s Salon début as showing “the differences in stages of technical competence between [Géricault and Delacroix]” concentrates in Delacroix the faults which in Emulation are ascribed to the group of young painters who emerged in the early 1820s. Crow, “Classicism in Crisis: Gros to Delacroix,” in Nineteenth-Century Art, 72–5. Matthew’s gospel has them indiscriminately killing male newborns in case one of them is the infant Christ. His is the only gospel that mentions this event. Matthew, 2:16–18. Cogniet’s use of shadow also exemplifies the debt to the Raft (folds of heavy blackness lent by the mother’s voluminous cape combine with the shadows of her hiding place). Cogniet chose a tonal handling for the same reasons Géricault did—the latter’s reliance upon chiaroscuro’s immediate provision of dramatic effect was constant. A second desperate Bethlehem mother, who appears unrelated in conception to their dominant representative, hurtles down the steps depicted in the narrow band to the left of the densely painted protective wall; specks of other figures struggle on a distant stairway. Arresting use of a foreground figure depicted as plunged-in shadow (with light confined to the middle ground) is dramatically used in David’s Lictors Returning to Brutus the Bodies of his Sons (1789). Neither Géricault nor his most famous painting figure feature as recurring topics in Baudelaire’s art criticism. For example, in the “Salon of 1846,” the following piece of envious praise is attributed to Géricault: Baudelaire says that Delacroix’s Dante and Virgil is a canvas on which Géricault would have been delighted to see his own signature. Baudelaire, “Salon,” 54. For example, the dark-haired woman in Portrait of an Old Woman differs from the impression conveyed by the brightly dressed figure seen in the Chios by virtue of Delacroix’s use of strong tonal contrasts in the earlier study; color there is largely confined to crescents of vermillion setting off the figure’s alert, fully rounded eyes. Especially significant is the fact that her lips remain slightly parted. “[E]nfin, M. Delacroix a peint son tableau.” Louis Vitet, “Salon de Peinture de 1827,” Le Globe, 95, 10 Nov. 1827, 505. “Certes, c’est une charmante idée, une idée toute nouvelle, que l’expression douloureuse et tendre de ces trois anges qui viennent annoncer à leur divin maître sa triste destinée. Il y a dans ces trois figures une poésie indéfinissable: c’est là une véritable inspiration. Ce qui appartient encore à M. Delacroix, ce qui rajeunit ce sujet si rebattu.” Ibid. A useful contrast with the freshness Vitet attributed to the Olives is a painting by Georges Rouget of the same subject from

49.

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51.

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two years earlier. Rouget, a contemporary of Delacroix trained in the studio of David (and who became an assistant to David), equipped the sleeping central figure with composed, normative angels. See Michael Caffort, “Sparta et Jérusalem, les Davidiens at la Peinture Religieuse sous la Restauration,” Revue d’Histoire de l’Église de France, 87 (2001): 415–37. “La fidélité historique est aussi loin d’exister dans le groupe des Anges. Selon la tradition, un Ange apporte le calice au Christ, qui le repousse d’abord, avant de s’être entièrement résigné à la volonté de Dieu, ou plutôt selon le texte de l’Ecriture, après la prière, ‘Seigneur, que ce calice s’éloigne de moi,’ il apparait au Sauveur un Ange qui le fortifie. Ici nous voyons trois Anges, qui viennent seulement visiter le Christ, et qui, au lieu de le fortifier, témoignent une profonde affliction de ses souffrances.” Farcy, “Exposition de 1827,” Journal des artistes, 9 Dec. 1827, 782. “Le groupe des trois anges qui apparaissent à Jésus est délicieux d’expression, de sentiment et de style … Quelle douleur dans ces messagers de consolation! Leur parole a frappé d’abattement le fils de Dieu, et il semble qu’ils voudraient pouvoir racheter le mal innocent qu’ils viennent de faire à la victime dont ils ont abreuvé le coeur d’amertume. Ravissante création! … La couleur de ce groupe est admirable, la mouvement en est d’une grâce et d’une naïveté touchante; on s’arrache difficilement à la contemplation qui fait naître une telle vue.” Auguste Jal, “Salon de 1827,” in Esquisses, croquis, pochades, ou tout ce qu’on voudra sur le Salon de 1827 (Paris, 1828), 114. From the considerable literature about David’s oppositional composition in the Horatii, selected references include Hugh Honour, Neoclassicism (Harmondsworth, 1972), 32–7; Crow, Painters and Public Life (New Haven, 1985), 241–54; Melissa Hyde, “Confounding Conventions: Gender Ambiguity and Francois Boucher’s Painted Pastorals,” Eighteenth-Century Studies, 30 (Fall 1996): 25–57. The religious commission which gave Delacroix his subject matter (and ensured the Olives’ on-time Salon arrival) is described in Delacroix: Peintures et dessins d’inspiration religieuse, 15–6. In what John P. Lambertson aptly calls “a “meticulous quantitative approach,” Eva Bouillo has charted the exceptionally protracted course the Salon took in 1827. Eva Bouillo, Le Salon de 1827: Classique ou romantique? (Rennes, 2009). J. Lambertson, Review of Le Salon de 1827, www.19thc-artwroldwide.org/ autumn11/review-of-le-salon-de1827-classique-ou-romantique-by-eva-bouillo. Accessed 14 Jul. 2014. “[T]elle main veut tel pied.” Baudelaire also marvels at the human race’s maddening “capacity for the most appalling variety” ([c]’est surtout dans la race humaine que l’infini de la variété se manifeste d’une manière effrayante). In “The Ideal and the Model,” Baudelaire refers to chapter 101 from the Histoire de la peinture en Italie directly, and to chapter 109 indirectly. Baudelaire, “Salon de 1846,” in Henri Lemaitre, ed., Curiosités esthétiques: L’Art romantique et autres oeuvres critiques (Paris, 1990), 148, 148–51. English translation from “Salon of 1846,” in Baudelaire, Art in Paris 1845–1862, trans. and ed. Jonathan Mayne (London, 1964), 81, 80; and Stendhal, Histoire de la peinture en Italie (Paris, 1817); reprint ed. Victor Del Litto (Paris, 1996), 306, 296–8, 260. “Tous les jours on voit un jeune homme de vingt ans arriver de province. Ce sont bien les couleurs les plus fraîches; c’est la plus belle santé … Quant au bon air, sans l’oisiveté des cours, sans l’ennui, sans

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l’amour, sans l’immense superflu, sans la noblesse héréditaire, sans les charmes de la société, je crains bien qu’on ne s’en fût jamais avisé.” Stendhal opposes, then, a hale appearance to the impressive but artificial appearance produced by the “idleness of the court, boredom,” and “immense excess.” Stendhal, Histoire de la peinture, 309, 314. 55. See, for example, the litany of Grenoble’s failings throughout the hundreds of pages Stendhal devotes to recollections of life before he left home for Paris as a 17-year-old. Stendhal, Vie de Henry Brulard (Milan, 1835); reprint eds. Gérald and Yvonne Rannaud (Paris, 1996). 56. “[I] found a pastiche of the Carracci, or, if you like, the portrait of an excellent actress who imitates maternal despair very well” ([J]e trouve un pastiche des Carrache, ou, si l’on veut, le portrait d’une excellente actrice qui joue fort bien le désespoir maternel). Stendhal, “Critique amère du Salon de 1824 par M. Van Eube de Molkirk,” in Stendhal, Salons, eds. Stéphane Guégan and Martine Reid (Paris, 2002), 85. I defer to Stendhal’s own title in this note, but I stick to the normative “Salon of 1824” in subsequent references. Prior to restoration by Guégan and Reid—reflecting the meticulous concern for sources taken in their collection of Stendhal’s writings on art—this lengthy title fell by the wayside in anthologies of Stendhal’s commentaries on the Salons. Guégan and Reid point out that Stendhal avoided the expected—titles included. Guégan and Reid also restore the preface with which Stendhal wanted his “Salon of 1824” to begin. See their observations in Stendhal, Salons, 15, 43, 55. In respect to the artists that Stendhal accuses Cogniet of copying, I emphasize that he uses the word “pastiche”; he doesn’t criticize the Carracci themselves. In 1827, Stendhal praises Annibale’s vocation and the Carracci Reform in general. He then hails the caliber of students produced by the Reform; Guido Reni is first on his list. Stendhal, “Salon de 1827,” in Stendhal, Salons, 164–5. (This mélange of brief discussions includes opinions about the 1827 Salon without amounting to the kind of fully fledged review Stendhal had given the previous Salon.) These views aren’t unique to 1827: Stendhal’s appreciation for the Carracci Reform and its return to drawing from nature is found in the History of Painting in Italy. For example, see Stendhal, Histoire de la peinture en Italie (Paris, 1817); reprint ed. Victor Del Litto (Paris, 1996), 114, 406. For the classic formulation of Giovanni Pietro Bellori’s concerns about the different inheritances consuming the schools of Italian painting in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, see Charles Dempsey, Annibale Carracci and the Beginnings of Baroque Style (Glückstadt, 1979); and “Idealism and realism in Rome around 1600,” in Il Classicismo: Medioevo Rinascimento Barocco, Atti del Colloquio Cesare Gnudi (Bologna, 1986), 233–43. For the erosion of Vasari’s authority in the later nineteenth century see, for example, John Hale, England and the Italian Renaissance: The Growth of Interest in its History and Art (London, 1954). 57. Stendhal’s short fuse here is another indication of his admiration of the Carracci and their teaching.

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2.

3. 4.

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Crow, Emulation, 222, and idem, “Classicism in Crisis,” in Stephen Eisenman, ed., Nineteenth-Century Art: A Critical History (London, 1994), 52. For Patricia Mainardi, the Salon’s power increased exponentially as the relationship between independent and academic artists remained fraught. Mainardi, The End of the Salon: Art and State in the Early Third Republic (Cambridge, 1993), 189–233. See also Fraser, Delacroix: Art and Patrimony, 20. Concerned that Forbin’s importance has been overshadowed by his well-known predecessor Vivant Denon, Marie-Claude Chaudonneret discusses the former’s often bold policies. Chaudonneret, L’État et les Artistes de la Restauration à la Monarchie de juillet, 1815–1833 (Paris, 1999), 80, 55–100. See also Fraser’s analysis of Forbin’s “surprisingly eager” acquisition of the Chios. Fraser, in Delacroix: Art and Patrimony, 82–92. Crow discusses Stendhal briefly, stressing his “famous attack on the School of David.” Crow, Emulation, 222–3, 334–5, n. 10, 22. See David Wakefield, “Stendhal and Delécluze at the Salon of 1824,” in The Artist and the Writer in France: Essays in Honour of Jean Seznec, eds. Francis Haskell, Anthony Levi, and Robert Shackleton (Oxford, 1974), 76–85. In 1824, Delécluze characterized the qualities of artists working in the Davidian tradition as “homérique.” He used the term “shakespearienne” to refer to artists who remained apart from it. (As Andrew Carrington Shelton has noted, however, Delécluze included Horace Vernet as well as Delacroix in the latter group.) The resulting opposition assumed the logic of a Derridean binary. The first term referred to the tradition of David: springing from natural and cultural needs, its mode was Greek and imitative. The term “shakespearienne” was secondary: purely literary and a betrayal of medium. According to Chaudonneret, in addition to his concerns about public confidence, the Comte de Forbin believed that such debates were detrimental to artists, because they rested upon attempts to categorize different approaches. Andrew Carrington Shelton, “Ingres versus Delacroix,” in Fingering Ingres, eds. Susan Siegfried and Adrian Rifkin (Oxford, 2001), 81; and M.C. Chaudonneret, L’État et les artistes, 98–9. For Chaudonneret, these debates took place over the years 1822 to 1831–3, and began with a familiar point of origin: the success of François Gérard’s Corinne at Cape Miseno (1819) at the 1822 Salon. The qualities perceived in a canvas painted by the premier peintre du roi are taken to anticipate their more extensive articulation in the critical discussions of the next Salon. Nonetheless, the ways in which these two sets of responses form a sequence have not been entirely clarified. Chaudonneret, in ibid., 80–6. The continuities between the period’s Salons have also been stressed by Claude Allemand Cosneau, in his “Le Salon à Paris de 1815 à 1850,” in Les Années romantiques: La Peinture française de 1815 à 1848, eds. Isabelle Julia and Jean Lacambre, exhibition catalog (Nantes, 1995), 106–29.

The full title as given in the livret is Scenes from the Massacres at Chios: Greek Families Awaiting Death or Slavery, etc. (See the various reports and newspaper accounts). (Scènes des massacres de Scio; familles grecques attendent la mort ou l’esclavage, etc. (Voir les relations diverses et les journaux de temps).) Pierre Sanchez and Xavier Seydoux, Les Catalogues des Salons des Beaux-Arts (1820–1833) vol. 2 (Paris, 1999), 61. Shelton has said that Delécluze is “now generally regarded as the principal spokesman of the artistic rearguard throughout the first half of the nineteenth century.” Andrew Carrington Shelton, “Art, Politics, and the Politics of Art: Ingres’s Saint Symphorien at the 1834 Salon,” Art Bulletin, 83 (Dec. 2001): 718, 735, n. 49. 8. The huge numbers of Greek casualties (more than 80,000 people, or most of the island’s inhabitants) after two months of bloodshed launched by Turkish forces in late April 1822 provoked horrified reaction in Paris. Extensive newspaper coverage—the compiled summaries mentioned in Delacroix’s title— alerted them to the atrocities. Nina Athanassoglou-Kallmyer, French Images from the Greek War of Independence, 1821-1830: Art and Politics under the Restoration (New Haven, 1989), 29. 9. Étienne-Jean Delécluze’s first “Salon” appeared in the Lycée français in 1819, four years after he turned to art criticism full time. He wrote his second review for the Moniteur universel in 1822 and moved to the Journal des débats in 1824, where he remained as critic until his death in 1863, although he regularly contributed to other journals. Before 1815, Delécluze had been an exhibitor at the Salon, where he’d shown history paintings. The longest single study devoted to Delécluze remains Robert Baschet, E.-J. Delécluze: Témoin de son temps (1781–1863) (Paris, 1942). 10. “Une révolution se déclare aujourd’hui dans la peinture comme dans tous les arts, et déjà les immobiles se lamentent et crient à la barbarie; déjà ils declarent que la peinture est perdue en France … malgré tous ces raisonnements assez concluants, les immobiles ne cessent de gronder.” Thiers, “Salon de 1824,” Le Constitutionnel, 25 Aug. 1824, in Adolphe Thiers, 145. Thiers’s description is quoted in M.C. Chaudonneret, L’État et les artistes, 81. See also Patrick Noon, “Colour and Effect: Anglo-French Painting in London and Paris,” in Constable to Delacroix: British Art and the French Romantics, exhibition catalog (London, 2003), 14, 23. In respect to the Salon, Patricia Mainardi has observed that Delécluze, worried that artists were sinking to mercenary demands for facile and portable painting, never wavered from his opposition to an annual exhibition. Patricia Mainardi, The End of the Salon: Art and State in the Early Third Republic (Cambridge, 1993), 18. 11. See, for example, Johnson’s comments on the Salons of 1838 and 1840. Lee Johnson, The Paintings of Eugène Delacroix: A Critical Catalogue, vol. 3 (Oxford, 1981), 80, 92. A succinct assessment of Delécluze’s particular significance is found in Michael Fried, “Thom7.

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14.

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16. 17. 18.

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as Couture and the Theatricalization of Action in Nineteenth-Century French Painting,” Artforum, 8 (Jun. 1970): 47, n. 35. Ewa Lajer-Burcharth, Necklines: The Art of Jacques-Louis David After the Terror (New Haven, 1999), 13–4; Abigail Solomon-Godeau, Male Trouble: A Crisis in Representation (London, 1997), 46–9; and Marijke Jonker, “‘This Deep, Great, and Religious Feeling’: Delécluze on History Painting and David,” Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide (on-line journal) 4 (Autumn 2005), www.19thc-artworldwide. org, accessed 14 Jul. 14, 2014. See also Richard Wrigley, The Origins of French Art Criticism from the Ancien Régime to the Restoration (Oxford, 1993), 229–30. Delécluze’s criticism from 1819 and 1822 is analyzed in Beth Wright, Painting and History During the French Restoration: Abandoned by the Past (Cambridge, 1997), 15–17, 30, 40. The importance of Delécluze’s writings of 1819 is argued for in James H. Rubin, “Delacroix’s Dante and Virgil as a Romantic Manifesto: Politics and Theory in the Early 1820s,” Art Journal, 52 (1993); 52–4; and idem, “Delacroix and Romanticism,” in The Cambridge Companion to Delacroix, ed. Beth S. Wright (Cambridge, 2001), 26–9. Delécluze’s ease with “the richness of a socially shared vocabulary for the sustained examination of art” is described in Elisabeth A. Fraser, Delacroix, Art and Patrimony in Post-Revolutionary France (Cambridge, 2004), 98–9. Restoration cénacles including Delécluze’s salon are discussed in Alan B. Spitzer, The French Generation of 1820 (Princeton, 1987), 97–128, 171–205; and idem, “Delacroix in His Generation,” in Wright, Cambridge Companion, 10. Nina Athanassoglou-Kallmyer, review of Marie-Claude Chaudonneret, L’État et les Artistes: De la Restauration à la Monarchie de Juillet (1815–1833) and Salons by Stendhal, Art Bulletin, 85 (Mar. 2003): 813; and Philippe Bordes, Jacques-Louis David: Empire to Exile, exhibition catalog (Williamstown, 2005), 192–3, n. 35. D. [Étienne-Jean Delécluze], “Exposition du Louvre 1824,” Journal des débats, October 5, 1824: “[L]a figure la plus remarquable est celle d’un homme dans la force de l’âge … blessé, sanglant, et comme hébété par son malheur.” Then, near the end of the same discussion, Delécluze repeated this opinion. “La figure la plus remarquable du Massacre de Chios est donc celle de l’homme blessé, étendu au centre de la compositon; la couleur en est vraie, et l’expression de la tête, belle en elle-même, sent en quelque sorte, d’explication à tout le reste de l’ouvrage, qui est trop confus.” Alex Potts, Flesh and the Ideal: Winckelmann and the Origins of Art History (New Haven, 1994), 237. Abigail Solomon-Godeau, Necklines: The Art of Jacques-Louis David After the Terror (New Haven, 1999), 156, 177, 223–34. Dorothy Johnson is a recent contributor to the central topic of the relations between David and Delacroix. See, for example, Dorothy Johnson, David to Delacroix: The Rise of Romantic Mythology (Chapel Hill, 2011), 182. Lajer-Burcharth, Necklines, 13–14, Potts, Flesh and the Ideal, 237. Bordes, Jacques-Louis David, 191. The full title of Alexandre Abel de Pujol’s painting is Germanicus on the Battlefield of Varus where Varus and his Legions were Massacred by the Germans (Germanicus sur le champ de bataille où Varus et ses légions furent massacrés par les Germains). This painting is permanently rolled up in storage. According to Chaudonneret, the tradition of David was in decline by 1824: “What [Thiers] protested was the degeneration of David’s

Delacroix and his Forgotten World

20.

21.

22.

23. 24.

manner … a fossilized system” (Ce qu’il conteste c’est l’abâtardissement de la manière de David … un système sclérosé). Chaudonneret, L’État et les artistes, 81. How great and widespread was the dislike for the contemporary Davidians cannot be underestimated. In his first article in the Globe, Thiers expounds on the weakness of the national school due to failings legion among these young painters. And he disparages painters such as Drolling because they were David’s “third generation” of students. “Les premiers ouvrages de David et de ses grands élèves ont eu ce dégrée de beauté et de naturel … mais à la troisième generation sont arrivés les exagérateurs, gens médiocres” (The first works of David and his great students had a degree of beauty and naturalness … but the exaggerators, mediocre people, ended up in the third generation). Thiers, “Salon de 1824,” Le Globe 2, 17 Sep. 1824, in Adolphe Thiers, 198. In particular, the quality of light was singled out for opprobrium in commentaries on the paintings of the contemporary Davidians. Delécluze refers to the “lustrous epidermis” (épiderme lustré) of the nude figures depicted in their paintings while Thiers, in the tirade against the contemporary Davidians that opens his Salon for the Constitutionnel, refers to their “beautiful figures” (belles formes) and repeatedly uses the adjective “glossy” (lisse). Delécluze, “Exposition du Louvre 1824,” Journal des débats, 11 Sep. 1824, 2; Thiers, “Salon de 1824,” Le Constitutionnel, 25 Aug. 1824; and Thiers, “Salon de 1824,” Le Globe, 2, 17 Sep. 1824, in Adolphe Thiers, 146, 200. In addition, Fabien Pillet sees Abel de Pujol’s use of light as frozen, stifling, and lifeless (especially in respect to his avoidance of chiaroscuro). “Les chairs [sic] manquent de transparence; l’air ne circule point entre les groupes … j’oserai dire que M. Abel de Pujol, trés habile dans le dessin et la composition, se montre tout-à-fait novice dans le science du clair obscur” (Translucent skin nowhere to be seen; groups of figures without a breath of air between them—skillful though he may be in the realms of drawing and composition, in the science of chiaroscuro, Abel de Pujol reveals himself an absolute beginner). Fabien Pillet, Une matinée au Salon, ou les peintres de l’école passés en revue, critique des tableaux et sculptures de l’exposition de 1824 (Paris, 1824), 18. Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby, Extremities: Painting Empire in Post-Revolutionary France (New Haven, 2002). See also Todd Porterfield, The Allure of Empire: Art in the Service of French Imperialism (1798– 1836) (Princeton, 1998), 104–6. Delacroix’s depiction of helplessness, not least in his studiously nonheroic and subjugated central figure, invited the pity of the contemporary French viewer. Fraser encompasses three Salons as she traces a developmental arc for Delacroix shaped by the anxieties and instability of familial and ultimately monarchical identities in the Restoration. Fraser, Delacroix: Art and Patrimony, 60–77. Athanassoglou-Kallmyer, French Images from the Greek War of Independence, 1821–1830 (New Haven, 1989), 34–5. The specific model has been traditionally identified as Jean-Baptiste Pierret, a friend Delacroix had known since school. Rubin has pointed out that no one model, either male or female, can be identified definitively as the single source for any particular figure in the Chios. Rubin, “Delacroix and Romanticism,” in Wright, 29–30. Grimaldo Grigsby, Extremities, 245–52. A wide selection of examples of the “heroic male nude, alpha and omega of history painting,” is given in

Solomon-Godeau, Male Trouble, 43. 25. Apart from his reviews of two Salons (in 1824 and 1827), Auguste Chauvin remains an elusive character for whom it is difficult to build a account of his larger career, in comparison to fellow critics who shared his general point of view but who sustained a longer commitment to art criticism or writing in general. Compare, for example, the publishing initiatives of the entrepreneurial Charles Paul Landon, a former student of David, as discussed in George D. McKee, “Charles-Paul Landon’s Advocacy of Modern French Art, 1800–1825: The Annales du Musée,” in Album Amicorum Kenneth C. Lindsay: Essays on Art and Literature, eds. Susan Alyson Stein and George D. McKee (Binghamton, 1990), 203–33. 26. The strength of his opinions (specifically in the case of his response to the work of David d’Angers) is noted in Chaudonneret, L’État, 96. See also Fraser, Delacroix, 63. 27. “A quelque distance de la ville de Chio [sic], que l’on aperçoit auprès de la mer, sont entassés des hommes, des femmes, des enfan[t]s presque nus et tout meurtris de coups et de blessures.” Delécluze, “Exposition.” 28. “Non seulement la disposition de la scène est effroyable comme on en peut juger, mais il semble qu’on ait pris à tâche de la rendre plus hideuse encore … par une teinte cadavereuse étalée sur ce tableau.” Ibid. 29. “Dans le grand tableau de Polyxène arrachée à sa mère Hécube, par Ulysse … il y a une fort belle tête, c’est celle de la jeune victime.” Idem, “Exposition,” 9 Oct. 1824. Drolling chose the scene from Euripides’s Hecuba when Odysseus arrives at the Greek camp to take Polyxena away from the captured Trojan queen: her daughter has been chosen as the victim who will be sacrificed to honor Achilles. The brightly lit, unruffled sea stretching behind the figures in Drolling’s painting includes the small but distinct shapes of Odysseus’s waiting ships. Sanchez and Seydoux, Les Catalogues des Salons, vol. 2, 92. Delécluze’s use of “Ulysses” follows the nomenclature of Salon livrets. As a source used by the students of David, Euripides was not a typical choice. See, for example, Antoine Schnapper, David: Témoin de son temps (Paris, 1980), 190. 30. “M. Drolling, auteur de cet ouvrage, a été heureusement inspiré en traitant cette partie importante de son sujet … [L]a tête de Polyxène est digne de captiver vivement l’attention.” Delécluze, “Exposition,” 9 Oct. 1824. 31. “Dans toute la fraîcheur de la jeunesse et de la beauté, la jeune fille, résignée, levant doucement ses yeux vers la ciel.” Ibid. 32. Daniel Arasse, Le Détail: Pour une Histoire rapprochée de la peinture (Paris, 1992), 39. 33. “[Q]ue de la présenter comme un soutien de la doctrine que je défends, je n’ai pour moi que la tête de Polyxène, de M. Drolling.” Delécluze, “Exposition.” 34. The importance of a specialized subject matter of Neapolitan and Roman peasantry to Schnetz’s work as well as that of Léopold Robert, an artist with whom Schnetz was closely associated, requires analysis beyond this book’s scope. See, for example, Jean-Victor Schnetz (1787–1870): Couleurs d’Italie, exhibition catalog (Orne, 2000); and Delécluze, Notice sur la Vie et les Ouvrages de Léopold Robert (Paris, 1838). In 1824, Schnetz’s Salon entries mixed this subject matter with canvases depicting religious subjects. Sanchez and Seydoux, Les

Catalogues des Salons, vol. 2, 119. 35. See the discussion of this exchange in Bordes, Jacques-Louis David, 193. 36. “On y voit Sainte Geneviève dans les murs de Paris, distribuant des vivres aux habitan[t]s assiéges de cette ville.” Delécluze, “Exposition,” 15 Sep. 1824. Schnetz depicted an episode from a fifth-century siege in which St Geneviève brought food into Paris for its starving citizens. 37. “Vers le centre du tableau, la Sainte, placée sur un [illegible], distribue et fait distribuer des vivres; autour d’elle sont des hommes, des femmes et des enfan[t]s qui tendent la main avec impatience, avec colère même quelquefois, se disputant entr’eux et ne faisant point attention au mérite de l’action de Sainte-Geneviève, de même que la Sainte, qui n’est nullement choquée de l’avidité de ceux qui l’entourent, semble obéir sincèrement à une loi de sa conscience, sans avoir l’idée de son propre dévouement.” Ibid. 38. “Sainte-Geneviève, dont le calme produit un si bel effet au milieu de ces physionomies agitées par des passions poignantes.” Ibid. 39. In 9 ACE, Germanic forces under their leader Arminius surrounded and killed Publius Quinctilius Varus along with three legions. They also captured their standards: an affront to imperial pride that demanded immediate expiation. Germanicus’s campaigns in 15 ACE included this as a principal aim. Returning to the forest of Teutoburgium was therefore an act of solemn commemoration. Tacitus described a somber, marshy plain within the forest where Varus and his legions had been killed. Their remains had been left in place or shamefully impaled on trees. Abel de Pujol depicted the plain six years later, when Germanicus and his soldiers paid their respects. At the commemoration, Germanicus raised a monument to the dead and buried their strewn bones. Chauvin and some other critics in 1824 made reference to the fact that Abel de Pujol had taken his subject specifically from Tacitus. Cornelius Tacitus, Annals, trans. Arthur Murphy (London, 1937), 1: 3, 51–2, 60–2. 40. An exception to this description might be the group on the left-hand side of the composition, depicted with a collection of bones of the fallen. 41. “A quoi attribuer, au contraire, l’indifférence que le public montre pour le tableau de Germanicus au champ de Varus, peint par M. Abel de Pujol? Le dessin est correct, la disposition des groupes est bien combiné … et le peintre n’a omis aucun des épisodes qui pouvaient faire comprendre le sujet … Cependant on n’est point ému. J’avouerai que moi-même, après être revenu trois ou quatre jours de suite devant cet ouvrage pour m’éprouver, je n’ai senti aucune émotion.” Delécluze, “Exposition,” 11 Sep. 1824. 42. “Sur la droite, il y a plusieurs figures trop visiblement imitées des Thermopyles [sic] de M. David; or, rien ne ralentit la pensée comme de lui faire suivre la trace de celle d’un autre.” Ibid. 43. Delécluze, Le Mécanicien roi (1832; reprint, Paris, 1995). 44. “[J]e parvins à reproduire dans un petit monde que j’avais entre mes mains et sous mes yeux, la contre-épreuve de tout ce qui s’agitait sur une étendue immense … Chaque jour je les voyais devenir plus maigres, plus jaunes, et pour ceux qui conservaient encore quelque vigueur, ils n’en faisaient usage que pour me maudire, et chercher à briser les inévitables coulisses sur lesquelles je les faisais glisser … [J]’aurais voulu le changer … [I]mpossible! … Vous sentez la

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45. 46.

47.

48.

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conséquence? Si j’avais détendu mes ressorts d’un seul cran, je n’étais plus maître de rien.” Ibid. 30–1. Delécluze, Louis David: Son École et son temps, souvenirs (1855; reprint, Paris, 1983), 186–7, 229–49, 336–49. Bordes, Jacques-Louis David, 268, 272, n. 31, has treated Delécluze’s memory as suspect, because this wish is not expressed in David’s text about the Leonidas, published to accompany its original exhibition, or in the anonymous biography of David that came out a year before his death. Jacques-Louis David, Explication (1814), in Jacques-Louis David, 1748–1825, exhibition catalog (Paris, 1989), 486; and Notice sur la vie et les ouvrages de M. J.-L. David (Paris, 1824). Bordes’s view differs from other opinions that David rejected his history paintings of the 1780s. “[D]es tableaux d’un ordre supérieur, tels que le Serment des Horaces, la Mort des fils de Brutus, en s’éloignant du maniéré, du fouilli, des formes de convention, n’atteignirent pourtant pas de prime-abord le véritable but qu’on se proposait. On y voit des poses théâtrales: tous les personnages savent qu’on les regarde, et se groupent en conséquence. Le dessin est beau, régulier, mais froid comme l’ensemble. Dans les Sabines, on remarque plus de vie, de mouvement, d’abandon … Avançons de quelques années; cette fusion est enfin complète, et Léonidas présente les caractères constitutifs d’un bon tableau d’histoire: style grave, expression vive, touchante, attitudes simples, dessin et coloris frappan[t]s de vérité, touche large et spirituelle [emphasis original].” Chauvin, Salon de mil huit cent vingt-quatre (Paris, 1825), 21–2. Fraser quotes part of this passage from Chauvin’s “Salon” in her discussion, but her argument takes a different direction from mine. Fraser, Delacroix, Art and Patrimony in Post-Revolutionary France (Cambridge, 2004), 108–9. Even within the period of time from the Horatii to the Sabines, a more comprehensive account would need to acknowledge many other important works by David; an obvious example is Marat at His Last Breath (1793). In specific reference to the 1820s, however, Chaudonneret has noted the inaugural priority given to the Horatii in accounts of David’s career. Chaudonneret, 186–7. “Germanicus, l’amour du peuple romain, pénétrant avec sa suite dans les forêts marécageuses où périrent tant de braves, est une de ces grandes figures sur lesquelles doit se porter l’intérêt général. C’est d’elle que dépend l’émotion du spectateur … [S]i quelque autre personnage occupe l’attention, appelle les regards, quelque puisse être d’ailleurs le talent du peintre, il n’a calculé ni sa mission, ni les moyens de son art. Or, la faute essentielle de M. Pujol, c’est de détruire cette unité d’intérêt qu’indique si parfaitement le simple récit de Tacite par une addition imaginaire. Valérius, vieux soldat romain échappé aux massacres, s’est réfugié dans le fond des bois … Enfin, il rassemble ses forces, et parvient au milieu de l’armée … [L]e vieux soldat, se traînant aux pieds de Germanicus, lui présente l’aigle de la dix-neuvième légion … Tacite ne parle aucunement de ce vieux soldat, encore moins de l’aigle de la dix-neuvième légion … Ainsi M. Abel Pujol n’a pas mis dans son tableau ce qui devait y être, et l’a surchargé d’une combinaison romanesque.” Chauvin, 27–8. Here, Chauvin criticizes Abel de Pujol use of conjectured episodes. He also invokes Tacitus’s description of Germanicus’s popularity, and, like Delécluze, mentions his recapture of nineteenth legion’s standard (the nine-

Delacroix and his Forgotten World

51.

52.

53.

54.

55.

teenth was the last of Varus’s three legions). Charles Dempsey has emphasized how public devotion to Germanicus grew even stronger after this expiation in “Nicolas Poussin Between Italy and France: Poussin’s Death of Germanicus and the Invention of the Tableau,” in L’Europa e l’Arte Italiana, ed. Max Seidel (Venice, 2000), 326. “[C]omparez les Massacres de Scio avec des sujets pittoresques analogues; voyez le Massacre des innocen[t]s de Poussin, voyez même la Révolte du Caire part M. Girodet; partout vous apercevrez la ruse luttant contre la force, des groupes intéressan[t]s, des points de repos, une sorte de péripétie, enfin, au milieu du carnage.” Chauvin, 14. According to Grimaldo Grigsby, it is impossible to assign fixed identities to the erotic constructions of race among the different figures in the Revolt at Cairo. She refers to the monumental nude Bedouin Arab warrior on the right-hand side of the painting; this group includes the nude black African who holds the decapitated head of a French soldier while clinging to the right thigh of the Bedouin. The latter also holds the figure of a collapsed Mameluke. These identities in turn are imposed because Bedouin and Mamelukes did not take part in the original revolt. Grimaldo Grigsby, Extremities, 124–60. Critics at the time consistently identified the struggling figure in the Revolt at Cairo as a Mameluke, attesting to the group’s prominence in contemporary Paris. Ibid., 134, 105–24. Poussin’s use of a “tragic mask” in the Massacre of the Innocents, as well as the painting’s sparseness, stony facture, and the color of its figures, indicate his departure from antitheses employed in other versions of the subject. Cropper, “Marino’s La Strage degli Innocenti, Poussin, Rubens, and Guido Reni,” Studi Secenteschi, 33 (1992): 141–63. For Aristotle, the scene from Sophocles’s Oedipus the King where Oedipus encounters the Messenger was exemplary. Over the course of this scene the Messenger illuminates the shadowy circumstances of Oedipus’s birth. The Messenger had arrived from Thebes to tell him that Polybus, its king, was dead. Oedipus thought of Polybus as his father. The Messenger hopes that Oedipus will return with him to ascend the throne. As they talk, the Messenger reveals that he was the one who entrusted the infant Oedipus to Polybus, after another shepherd had discovered the abandoned child. Although he brought him up as a son, Polybus was “naught to [Oedipus] in blood.” Although he was the agent of Oedipus’s misery, the Messenger had set out with the best of intentions: Aristotle emphasized this. He had hoped that he could “rid [Oedipus] of his anxiety about his mother by revealing his parentage.” Instead, the disclosure brought him agony: this was the unexpected reversal. Aristotle, Poetics, 10–12, eds. T.E. Page, E. Capps, and W.H.D. Rouse, Loeb Classical Library (London, 1927), 37–42; and Sophocles, Oedipus the King, in Sophocles, vol. 1, trans. F. Storr, Loeb (London, 1912), 93–7. See Ekkehard Eggs, “Doxa in Poetry: A Study of Aristotle’s Poetics,” Poetics Today, 23 (Fall 2002): 395–426. Dempsey has pointed out that the term’s correct usage appeared in a text seminal for the French tradition, the Abbé d’Aubignac’s La Pratique du Théâtre (1657). Yet even as this early source retained its initial importance, of greater significance, according to Dempsey, was the diffusion of Poussin’s rigorously pictorial adaptation of the Poetics’ conceptualization of tragedy. Dempsey, “Nicolas Poussin Between Italy and France: Poussin’s Death of Germanicus and the Invention of the Tableau,” in L’Europa e l’arte italiana, ed. Max Seidel

(Venice, 2000), 334, n. 28, 331. 56. In the exemplary scene from Oedipus the King, the point when the Messenger says that Polybus was “naught to [Oedipus] in blood” marks the beginning of Oedipus’s realization of the truth of the oracle’s prediction. This is the process of recognition (anagnorisis) deemed essential by Aristotle in developing a peripeteia’s tragic potential. In his text discussing the Sabines and the circumstances of its exhibition, David included a short speech: Hersilia’s declaration, as he imagined it, delivered in the thick of battle. His choice of moment fulfills the concept of a peripeteia, because the delivery and effect of Hersilia’s speech introduces the requisite reversal in the sequence of events. See Eggs, “Doxa in Poetry,” 409–14. Commentaries on David’s distribution of Hersilia’s speech include Lajer-Burcharth, 144; and Jean-Rémy Mantion, “David en toutes lettres,” in David contre David, ed. Régis Michel, vol. 2 (Paris, 1993), 813–4. 57. Potts, Flesh and the Ideal, 229. According to Potts’s closely argued discussion, the dominance of Winckelmann’s beautiful style in the Sabines is invested in the male figures, especially in the figure of Romulus. The intervention of Hersilia and the other female figures interrupts the flow of heroic energy expended in battle.

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Notes to Chapter 3

1.

See for example, Athanassoglou-Kallmyer’s focus on Delacroix’s oil-sketch portrait of Paganini in “Blemished Physiologies: Delacroix, Paganini, and the Cholera Epidemic of 1832,” in Modern Art and the Grotesque, ed. Frances S. Connelly (Cambridge, 2003), 98–138. Delacroix’s Greece on the Ruins of Missolonghi (1826), which wasn’t a Salon entry, has also benefited from sustained attention. Crow’s discussion of the painting in his overview of the period from 1789 to 1830 was followed by a longer, polemical analysis by Grimaldo Grigsby. She discusses Delacroix’s use of paint as part of her identification of Greece as woven from complicated strands: the philhellenic sentiments animating Paris in 1825, and the equally contemporary, but much more variegated—and qualified—celebration of a newly independent Haiti. Grimaldo Grigsby, Extremities (New Haven, 2002), 281–314, 297. Crow, “Classicism in Crisis: Gros to Delacroix,” in Nineteenth-Century Art: A Critical History, ed. Stephen F. Eisenman (London, 1994), 80–1. 2. “[U]ne jeune femme renversée, et qui a perdu connaissance, un petit enfant est couché sur son sein.” Marie Aycard and Ferdinand Flocon, Salon de mil huit cent vingt-quatre (Paris, 1824), 14. 3. “Ici une jeune mère est étendue morte, et un enfant suce encore sa mamelle.” Thiers, “Exposition de 1824,” Le Globe, 7, 28 Sep. 1824, in Adolphe Thiers, 206. 4. “[U]n enfant qui demande du lait au sein de sa mère, déjà morte.” Stendhal, “Salon de 1824,” Salons, 67. 5. “Pourquoi lui prêter un air plus hideux avec ces touches heurtées d’un pinceau qui entasse les couleurs les unes auprès des autres, sans les unir et leur donner aucune harmonie entre elles?” “L’Amateur sans prétention,” “Salon de 1824,” Le Mercure du dix-neuvième siècle, 7, 201–2. 6. See Spector’s account in Jack Spector, Delacroix: The Death of Sardanapalus (New York, 1974), 25–7, 43–6. 7. “[U]ne mère qui a rendu le dernier soupir … me sembla peinte avec du blanc d’Espagne.” “L’Amateur,” “Salon de 1824,” 202. This specific identification of a kind of paint is on the list of adjectival terms the “Amateur” used to describe the colors of the central figures. The array of specifically ethnic terms referred to in Grimaldo Grigsby’s excerpt from this “Salon” forms another part of this list. Grimaldo Grigsby, “‘Whose colour was not black nor white nor grey, but an extraneous mixture, which no pen can trace, although perhaps the pencil may’: Aspasie and Delacroix’s Massacres at Chios,” Art History, 22 (Dec. 1999): 696. 8. “[U]ne jeune femme renversée, et qui a perdu connaissance.” Aycard and Flocon, Salon, 14. 9. “[C]es bras et ces jambes pétrifiées.” Pillet, Une matinée au Salon, 25. 10. Grimaldo Grigsby, “ Aspasie and Delacroix’s Massacres at Chios,” 688. 11. “[N]i la vie ni la mort n’ont jamais donné un pareil teint à personne.”

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L’Amateur,” 202. 12. “Permettez-nous de demander à M. Delacroix où sont le ventre et la croupe de ce cheval?” Alphonse Rabbe, “Beaux-Arts: MM. Delacroix, Allaux, et Lancrenon,” Le Courrier français, 253, 9 Sep. 1824, 4. (Rabbe did not make any direct comments on the Chios; collected pieces of anonymous commentary comprise this installment of his “Salon.”) 13. “[Delacroix] a fait un cheval qui n’a ni tête ni croupe.” Thiers, “Exposition de 1824,” Le Globe 7, 28 Sep. 1824, in Adolphe Thiers, 207. 14. The head seems based on the features and smaller head of an Arabian horse. But this physiognomic resemblance can’t account for the almost miniaturized, “toy horse” effect of this figure, nor does it bear on the depletion of mass. Lee Johnson has noted that Delacroix had a fondness for drawing Arabian horses, but says that it was “after the 1820s.” Lee Johnson, “Delacroix et Géricault: liens et divergences,” in Delacroix: la naissance d’un nouveau romantisme, exhibition catalog (Rouen, 1998), 25. 15. “[Le cheval] se soutient on ne sait comment.” Thiers, “Exposition de 1824,” Le Globe 7, 28 Sep. 1824, in Adolphe Thiers, 207. 16. “[U]n cavalier musulman, arrivant au galop.” Ibid., 206. 17. Grimaldo Grigsby’s argument here addresses a contemporary confusion: critics couldn’t distinguish oppressor from oppressed and were frustrated—they had expected copious clues via aesthetically superior (Greek) features guiding them to figures from the island of Chios itself. Nonetheless, the figure on the rearing horse is depicted as domineering—as obviously Turkish. Grimaldo Grigsby, “Aspasie and Delacroix’s Massacres at Chios,” 682. 18. First quotation: “Quelle embûche!” Pillet, Une matinée au Salon, 25. Second quotation: “Je n’entrerai point dans les détails de cette composition véritablement démoniaque.” Anon., “Salon de 1824,” Le Diable boiteux 247, 3 September 1824, 3. 19. “[U]n assemblage confus de figures, ou plutôt de demi-figures, car aucune n’offre un développement complet.” Charles-Paul Landon, “Salon de 1824” (Paris, 1824), 54. 20. “Un abattement morne et sinistre est répandu sur les figures des captifs.” Aycard and Flocon, Salon, 13. 21. “Des cadavres déjà marqués de l’empreinte de destruction.” “L’Amateur,” 199. For Stendhal’s criticism see Chapter 5. 22. “[P]rêt à entraîner son butin, [le cavalier] tire son sabre pour se débarrasser d’une femme, la mère de sa captive qu’elle cherche à lui arracher.” Aycard and Flocon, 14. 23. Elisabeth A. Fraser, Delacroix, Art, and Patrimony in Post-Revolutionary France (Cambridge, 2004), 65. For Grimaldo Grigsby, “Delacroix impacts the foreground with a crumbling wall of morose and passive figures, who meagerly rise up the image’s sides.” Grimaldo Grigsby, Extremities, 240. 24. Jobert describes a more organized Chios than we have seen so far. His

25.

26.

27.

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view is that the painting achieves a structural opposition between active and passive units; he sees the opposition of “two great pyramidal masses that balance the composition,” resulting in an “arrangement of figures, perfectly mastered, [that] makes the picture an ensemble of great masses that balance each other and that are also harmoniously composed and balanced in detail.” Jobert, Delacroix, 74. “[I]l ne fallait pas amonceler confusément des figures dont on ne distingue ni l’état, ni la situation.” Thiers, “Salon de 1824,” Le Constitutionnel, 30 Aug. 1824, in Adolphe Thiers, 154. A canvas from the very same time period as the Chios and the Sardanaplus (the now-destroyed Justinian Composing His Laws [1826]), prompted Du Camp to compare Delacroix to an enameler or goldsmith. Du Camp excuses a badly drawn central figure because a “master jeweler enamored of his materials” conjures an illusionism specific to ornamentation; one with “precious stones” that “looked as if set in enameled gold” (Le Justinien composant ses lois a un cou démesuré; il est maigre, osseux, et pourtant mou sous ses vêtements … mais avec quelle science de joaillier amoureuse de ses bijoux le peintre a rendu les pierreries serties dans l’or émaillée, avec quel soin sans pareil il a brodé les brodequins impériaux et orné de pierres précieuses le collet de la tunique: rubis, émeraudes, saphirs, aigues marines, turquoises, tout est imité jusqu’à l’illusion). Maxime Du Camp, Les Beaux-Arts à l’Expostion universelle de 1855 (Paris, 1855), 110. Although the figures in the Sardanapalus flummox Jal when criticizing this canvas in his review of the 1827 Salon, their “finery” captures high praise, on account of details that are painted “grandly” ([J]e pourrais demander grâce pour … des acessoires largement et fièrement traités). Auguste Jal, “Salon de 1827,” in Esquisses, croquis, pochades (Paris, 1828), 115. Delacroix’s largest entry to the Salon of 1827 convinces Louis Vitet that its painter possesses “the imagination of a colorist.” Vitet lingers on the accouterments Delacroix depicted but warns him that “it’s not enough to astonish the eyes.” The ornamentation is all “in vain” because the Sardanapalus lacks a modus operandi for its “precious stones, flowers, cloths of gold and silk, in a word, all that dazzle” (C’est sans doute une idée heureuse, une idée de peintre que d’avoir voulu représenter les derniers moments de Sardanapale; rien de plus séduisant pour une imagination brillante, surtout pour l’imagination d’un coloriste, que de grouper sur une toile … des pierreries, des fleurs, des étoffes d’or et de soie, en un mot tout cet éclat … Mais il ne suffit pas d’éblouir les yeux, il faut encore que l’intelligence puisse comprendre ce dont les yeux s’amusent … Si vous … ne pouvez en outré deviner sur quel sol reposent les personnages, en quel lieu se passé l’action, c’est en vain qu’on étalerait devant vous toutes les richesses de la palette de Rubens). L. Vitet, “Salon de 1824,” Le Globe, 39 8 Mar. 1828, 253. To be sure, Delacroix’s friendship with Parkes Bonington began in 1816, and his technique in the Sardanapalus, for example, has been shown to avail of Constable’s enlivening of glaze layers through the technique of “flossing.” See, inter alia, Patrick Noon, “Anglo-French Painting in London and Paris”; and Bann, “Print Culture and the Illustration of History,” in Constable to Delacroix: British Art and the French Romantics, ed. P. Noon, exhibition catalog (London, 2003), 12–27, 29. Carol Armstrong, Odd Man Out: Readings of the Work and Reputa-

30. 31.

32. 33.

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tion of Edgar Degas (Chicago, 1991), 195–205, 226–35; and Rosalind Krauss, “Impressionism: The Narcissism of Light,” Partisan Review 43 (1976), 111–2. Ibid. As John P. Lambertson has pointed out, the huge amount of detail on the Salon of 1827 revealed by Eva Bouillo include the intricacies of its “four separate hangings” complete with “instructive floor plans” of those hangings. Of particular interest is Bouillo’s attention to how, over the months, the paintings were arranged and rearranged throughout various rooms in the Louvre. She likens these unprecedented reconfigurations to a game of musical chairs. J. Lambertson, Review of Le Salon de 1827: Classique ou romantique?, Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide 10 (Autumn 2011), www.19thc-artworldwide.org/autumn11/review-of-le-salon-de-1827-classiqueou-romantique-by-eva-bouillo. Accessed 14 Jul. 2014. Eva Bouillo, Le Salon de 1827: Classique ou romantique? (Rennes, 2009), 251–6; 46–53. Spector, 27. It is a shorthand effect often seen in the history of painting as a routine intensifier of the equine imagery; depicting the bit directs attention to ironmongery against gums and teeth. See, for example, the central horse portrayed in Rosa Bonheur’s Horse Fair (1853). T. J. Clark, Picasso and Truth: From Cubism to Guernica (Princeton, 2013), 268, 273.

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Notes to Chapter 4

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“Il est au salon un tableau sur lequel tout le monde a été d’accord, et dans lequel on s’est plu à reconnaître un grand mérite.” Thiers, “Exposition de 1824,” Le Globe 8, 30 Sep. 1824, in Adolphe Thiers, 209. See, for example, Barthélémy Jobert, Delacroix (Princeton, 1998), 75; and David Wakefield, “Stendhal and Delécluze at the Salon of 1824,” in The Artist and the Writer in France: Essays in Honour of Jean Seznec, eds. Francis Haskell, Anthony Levi, and Robert Shackleton (Oxford, 1974), 76–85. Crow briefly mentions Sigalon in a reference to the young painters of the 1820s. Crow, Emulation, 221. Sigalon, Cogniet, Delaroche, and so on, share with later artists such as Ernest Meissonier and Henri Regnault the fate of a chilly neglect caused by the critical celebration of modernist painting. Exiled beyond the avant-garde pale, their once-immense reputations were seen as founded on a system that failed to recognize or anticipate progressive tendencies, instead prizing regressive skills (especially veristic painting). But historians of nineteenth-century French painting have become wary of an impulse to simply gather more artists into the scholarly net. Without readjusting the value system which relocated them in the first place, so-called “Salon stars” can end up in an alternative pantheon. See Marc Gotlieb, The Plight of Emulation: Ernest Meissonier and French Salon Painting (Princeton, 1996); and “How Canons Disappear: The Case of Henri Regnault,” in Art History and Its Institutions: Foundations of a Discipline, ed. Elizabeth Mansfield (London, 2002). One of the few other paintings that shows the effects of poison would be Nicolas Poussin’s Man Killed by a Snake. The interwoven themes of representation and death in that painting have been evocatively discussed by T.J. Clark in The Sight of Death (New Haven, 2006). These lines from Racine’s Britannicus (act IV, scene 4) are spoken by the character of Narcissus. The play does not include a scene depicting the poisoning; rather, Narcissus reports on the test to Nero: [Locuste] a fait expirer un esclave à mes yeux Et le fer est moins prompt pour trancher une vie Que le nouveau poison que sa main me confie.

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In his preface to Britannicus, Racine says that he copied the character of the principals in the play from Tacitus (although the play changes much about the historical record), and Locusta is not mentioned. Jean Racine, “Second Préface (1676),” Britannicus (1669), reprint Lausanne, 1945, 64; and Cornelius Tacitus, Annals, trans. (Latin) Alfred John Church and William Jackson Brodribb (New York, 1942), 283, 293 (12.66, 13.15). See also Lucy MacClintock, “Romantic actualité: Contemporaneity and Execution in the Work of Delacroix, Vernet, Scheffer, and Sigalon,” Ph.D. thesis, Harvard University 1993, 127. “A sa chute, un serpent se glisse parmi les ronces, le hibou s’envole

Delacroix and his Forgotten World

7.

en poussant un cri funèbre, et le ciel s’obscurcit.” Auguste Chauvin, Salon de mil huit cent vingt-quatre (Paris: Pillet ainé, 1825), 24. The shapes of the snake and owl can still be seen in the painting: dull traces of amber glints highlighting scales, eyes and beak linger still. In reference to the School of David’s much-vaunted emphasis on drawing, Delécluze warned of the dangers of emphasizing the body’s exterior beauty which produced such phenomena as skin that looked too sleek: [I]f the painter only looks for an appearance of beauty, if he contents himself by masking his figures with a lustrous epidermis, with no form of energy, with no true feeling to move them, he will not lack for coldness. ([S]i le peintre ne cherche qu’un apparence de beauté, s’il se contente de recouvrir ses figures d’un épiderme lustré, qu’aucune forme énergique, qu’aucun sentiment vrai vrai n’agitent, il ne manque pas d’être froid.)

Delécluze, “Exposition du Louvre 1824,” Journal des débats, 11 Sep. 1824: 2. 8. “Cette homme [Romulus] combat pour son trône et pour sa vie … et pourtant il ne songe qu’à faire le superbe, à nous montrer ses beaux muscles, et à déployer de la grâce à lancer un trait.” Stendhal, “Salon de 1824,” 46. In Chapter 5, I discuss how this aversion also highlights the extent to which Stendhal’s dislike was prompted by Romulus’s playing at being in battle. 9. Bann’s observation on contrast is part of his discussion of Delaroche’s development informed in these years by investigation of the structures of the Annunication scene: “Delaroche needs the sharp contrast between interrogator and victim in order to reinterpret the effect of dramatic interpenetration between ‘heavenly’ and ‘earthly’ space, which is a persistent (but semiotically evolving) feature of the Annunciation type.” Bann, Delaroche, 83, 79. 10. This link has not been drawn out before, although Bann has noted the debt to the Davidian frieze in Delaroche’s Joan of Arc. Bann’s deep analysis of this painting’s spatial structures and the image of Joan of Arc identifies Delaroche’s critical transformation of a “familiar image of Joan,” that of Pierre Révoil’s Joan of Arc in Prison at Rouen (1819), in which “the arrangement of the contrasted figures in a planar ordering accentuated by Joan’s gesture recalls the nine years that [Révoil] spent in the studio of David.” Bann sees Delaroche’s Lady Jane Grey (1834) as his most Davidian painting; however, “difference[s] within similarity” in regard to its “scenic space” are pursued by Delaroche, with ultimately “differing artistic languages proposed by the two painters.” Ibid., 81, 125, 124–6. 11. The pamphlet also lists honors and prizes. The Locusta was not in

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13. 14.

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18. 19.

fact bought by the State in 1824, but it received a medal. Anon., L’Observateur au musée, ou détails exacts des tableaux qui ont enrichi cette belle collection en l’année 1824 et celle précédente (Paris, 1824), 7. “L’esclave renversé se replie sur lui-même … frappant du pied sur la terre.” Thiers, “Exposition de 1824,” Le Globe 8, 30 Sep. 1824, in Adolphe Thiers, 209. “L’esclave … donne les signes de la plus violente douleur.” Ibid. Chauvin described the alarmed movements of the owl and the snake once they heard the fall of the slave to the ground. Chauvin, “Salon,” 24. Invisible in reproduction but somewhat apparent in the painting itself, is a goblet in the right foreground to the left of the slave’s left thigh. It underlines the effect of his violent fall since it is seen tumbled on its side—as if flung aside as the slave fell. A drop of white paint is visible at the bottom of the goblet: a tiny but direct trace of the poison depicted in the scene. Emphasis added. “[L]’esclave … victime obéissante, expire et se roule sur le sol, où de violentes douleurs viennent de le précipiter. Le malheureux porte une main défaillante à ses flancs déchirés.” Chauvin, “Salon,” 24. “L’esclave … se déchirant les flancs … L’esclave renversé se replie sur lui-même.” Thiers, “Exposition de 1824,” Le Globe 8, 30 Sep. 1824, in Adolphe Thiers, 209. “[Narcisse] regarde un esclave dans le sein duquel Locuste vient de verser un breuvage mortel.” Ibid. Crucially Delécluze found nothing inward about the painting, and nothing at which he could pause:

exertions of straining figures derived from the foreground figures in the Horatti: “a group of knights … in the pose of the Horatii, their arms and hamstrings stretched out” (un groupe de chevaliers … dans la pose des Horaces, les bras et les jarrets tendus). Scheffer’s contempt for such figures show how allergic critics in the 1820s could be to any obvious rehearsal of the Davidian paradigm of the period of the 1780s. For the same reasons, Charles Steuben’s painting depicting three male figures swearing an oath exhibited in the 1824 Salon proved unpopular among critics including Stendhal. Arnold Scheffer, “Salon de 1827,” Revue française, 1–11 (1828), 204; and Stendhal, “Salon,” 47–8. 22. See note 18. 23. Bann, Delaroche, 79–83. 24. “Le fraças ambitieux de la composition.” Charles Farcy, “Examen du Salon du 1827,” Journal des artistes, 3 Feb. 1828: 66.

I reconsidered my first, disagreeable, impression [of the Locusta]. Since none of the exterior forms presented in this painting offers my eyes real pleasure, I soon searched to see if my mind, my soul, were able at least to find something at which they could gently pause. But if anything, the thought is even more terrible than the appearance of the subject and this painting offers one of those desperate compositions that one seems to take a sad pleasure reveling in today … I cannot find any relief in M. Sigalon’s work; everything saddens me, makes me despair, and withers the soul. ([J]’en reviens à ma première impression, qui a été désagréable. Comme rien de ce que les formes extérieures, présentées dans ce tableau, n’offre de plaisir réel aux yeux, j”ai cherché bientôt à m’assurer si mon esprit, mon âme pourr[a]ient au moins trouver quelque chose sur quoi ils puissent s’arrêter doucement. Mais la pensée, si cela est possible, est plus terrible encore que l’appareil du sujet; et ce tableau offre une de ces compositions désespérantes dont on semble prendre un triste plaisir à se repaître de nos jours … Dans l’ouvrage de M. Sigalon, je ne puis trouver aucun compensation, tout m’attriste, me désespère, et me séche l’âme.) Delécluze, “Salon de 1824,” Journal des débats, 9 October 1824, 3–4. 20. See Michael Fried’s analysis of such effects in the Horatii in Fried, “Thomas Couture and the Theatricalization of Action in 19th-Century French Painting,” Artforum, 8 (1970), 46, n. 32. 21. In 1827 the critic Arnold Scheffer described, with weary sarcasm, the

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See, for example, discussions by Jean Clay, in trans. Daniel Wheeler and Craig Owens, Romanticism (New York, 1981), 3; David Wakefield, Stendhal and the Arts (London, 1973), 2, 1–31; and “Stendhal and Delécluze at the Salon of 1824,” in The Artist and the Writer in France: Essays in Honour of Jean Seznec, eds. Francis Haskell, Anthony Levi, and Robert Shackleton (Oxford, 1974), 76–85. In her overview of adjusted expectations for ugliness and beauty found in a range of critics and theorists during the Napoleonic and Restoration periods, Fiona Gatty notes that the strength of opinion Stendhal voiced in 1824 shows how much “the language of art criticism had shifted and changed” by the early 1820s. See Gatty, “Beauty and Monstrosity in Nineteenth-Century French Art Criticism, 1801–1824,” in The Beautiful and the Monstrous: Essays in French Literature, Art, and Culture, eds. Amaleena Damlé and Aurélie L’Hostis (Bern, 2010), 52. In his review of the Salon of 1822, Stendhal regretted that a typical painting of the day avoided contrast: “To have success today, everything has to be colored gray” (Aujourd’hui, pour avoir du succès, il faut colorier tout en gris). He emphasized how rare chiaroscuro had become as a pictorial choice: “What! To dare to avail of brilliant light and dark shadows!” (Quoi, oser se servir de lumières brillantes et d’ombres obscures!) Stendhal, “Exposition de peinture au Louvre,” Paris Monthly Review, May 1822; in Salons, 53. After attributing a narrow range of qualities to epic poetry and sculpture, Stendhal elevates “the talent of the painter and the dramatist.” Both art forms are defined by the same “remarkable condition”: they must portray hidden passions ([I]l ya une circonstance remarquable dans le talent du peintre et du poète dramatique. On ne voit pas les passions … avec les yeux du corps.) Stendhal, Histoire de la peinture en Italie, 260. Scholarly explanations for this recommendation encompass many mid- to late seventeenth-century contextual factors (for example, increasing precision in clock mechanisms), but a common opinion is the strength of Racine’s wish to recuperate Vigilian economies of conjured time. (This could be an antidote to the slack time-keeping of contemporary drama.) This echoes Racine’s defense of Bérénice’s (1670) economy of plot, centered on the separation of the Emperor Titus from the eponymous Jewish queen: “There is nothing more touching in all of poetry than Virgil’s separation of Aeneas and Dido. If such material can inspire an epic poem, one where the action lasts several days, why can’t it also be enough for tragedy, where the action shouldn’t last any longer than a few hours?” (Nous n’avons rien de plus touchant dans tous les poètes que la séparation d’Énée et de Didon dans Virgile. Et qui doute que ce qui a pu fournir assez de matière pour tout un chant d’un poème héroïque, où l’action dure plusieurs jours, ne puisse suffire pour le sujet d’une tragédie, dont la durée ne doit être que de quelques heures?) Jean Racine, Bérénice

Delacroix and his Forgotten World

(1670) reprint Richard Parish, ed. (Paris, 1996), i. See also Roland Racevskis, Time and Ways of Knowing Under Louis XIV (Lewisburg, 2003), 28. 5. “La tragédie racinienne ne peut jamais prendre que les trente—six heures d’une action; donc jamais de développements de passions. Quelle conjuration a le temps de s’ourdir, quel mouvement populaire peut se développer en trente-six heures? Il est intéressant, il est beau de voir Othello, si amoureux au premier acte, tuer sa femme au cinquième. Si ce changement a lieu en trente-six heures, il est absurde, et je méprise Othello.” Stendhal, Racine et Shakespeare (1823–4), reprint ed. Léon Delbos (Oxford, 1907), 26–7. 6. See, for example, Thomas G. Pavel’s opinions about Stendhal’s “indecisive stance on classicism.” T. G. Pavel, “Racine and Stendhal,” Yale French Studies, 76 (1989): 267–8. 7. John Golder, “Mon Sans Culotte Africain: A French Revolutionary Stage Othello,” in Shakespeare: World Views, eds. Heather Kerr, Robin Eden, and Madge Mitton (Adelaide, 1992), 146. 8. Ibid. 9. Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of Shaftesbury, “A Notion of the Historical Draught of Hercules,” in Second Characters, or The Language of Forms (London, 1712), reprint ed. Benjamin Rand (Cambridge, 1914), 9, 11. 10. Before Stendhal presents an example of such a “delicious and very rare instant,” he describes which parts of a tragedy quench opportunities for such a moment and which parts don’t. While some culprits are obvious (such as the plot-accelerating strategies of the speech), Stendhal also dismisses occurrences where any “three or four lines” at a time are deigned “admirable and remarkable as poetry.” His analysis of “moments of complete illusion” are also pertinent: those experiences are of “infinitely brief duration” and last for just a “half-second or a quarter-second.” (He also allows for “ a second or two at a time.”) “[T]hese delicious instants” remain ungreeted by applause or admiration; the latter only reflect praise for the skills bolstering the artificiality of an evening at the theater. “Il me semble que ces moments d’illusion parfaite sont plus fréquents qu’on ne le croit en général [mais ils] durent infiniment peu, par exemple une demi-seconde, ou un quart de seconde. [En plus, c]es instants charmants ne se rencontrent ni au moment d’un changement de scène, ni au moment précis où le poète fait sauter douze ou quinze jours au spectateur, ni au moment où le poète est obligé de placer un long récit dans la bouche d’un de ses personnages, uniquement pour informer le spectateur d’un fait antérieur, et dont la connaissance lui est nécessaire, ni au moment où arrivent trois ou quatre vers admirables, et remarquables comme vers [original emphasis].” Stendhal, Racine et Shakespeare, 9, 10. 11. “Ces instants délicieux et si rares d’illusion parfaite ne peuvent se rencontrer que dans la chaleur d’une scène animée, lorsque le répliques des acteurs se pressent; par exemple, quand Hermione dit à Oreste,

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qui vient d’assassiner Pyrrhus par son ordre: Qui te l’a dit? Jamais on ne trouvera ces moments d’illusion parfaite, ni à l’instant où un meurtre est commis sur la scène, ni quand des gardes viennent arrêter un personnage pour le conduire en prison. Toutes ces choses, nous ne pouvons les croire véritables, et jamais elles ne produisent d’illusion. Ces morceaux ne sont faits que pour amener les scènes durant lesquelles les spectateurs rencontrent ces demi-secondes si délicieuses [original emphasis].” Ibid., 9–10. “Il est incontestable qu’un être de longue main endurci dans le crime ne fait pas de gestes convulsifs à la vue d’une chose aussi simple qu’un esclave que l’on fait mourir. A Rome, sous les empereurs et avant le triomphe de la religion chrétienne, faire mourir un esclave, c’était comme dans le Paris d’aujourd’hui, faire abattre un chien de basse-cour dont les cris incommodent.” Stendhal, “Salon de 1824,” in Salons, 90. Stendhal did not identify the critic or critics who made this observation about Locusta’s gesture. He referred in general to the comments of “men of letters” (des gens de lettres) and may have been reporting on conversations he had heard; he was active in the cénacles and salons around which revolved the social life of critics, artists, and journalists in the 1820s. (For Chaudonneret’s excellent account of how important these circles were, see Adolphe Thiers, 9–11.) “[V]ous aurez un ouvrage estimable comme cent autres tableaux dont les hommes froids ont tapissé le Salon … il ne se trouve pas dix spectateurs pour s’arrêter devant leurs ouvrages.” Ibid. Stendhal was probably referring here to contemporary Davidian paintings: as mentioned, Delécluze noted the scant attention the Germanicus received from the Salon public. The anti-Rococo reaction included a new-found respect for the superiority of easel painting over traditions of fresco or decorative painting. For aesthetic theorists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, history painting was the epitome of easel painting. Lower genres could resist the decorative too, however: by cleanly stopping at the edge of the painting, the stretcher was a safeguard against assimilation to the Rococo tendency to extend the pictorial onto other surfaces (furniture, wall-hangings, etc.). On this, see Fried, Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (California, 1980); and Manet’s Modernism, 267–8. “Locuste commet le crime, mais, si j’ose parler ainsi, son âme en éprouve le contre-coup; c’est qu’autrefois elle eut un coeur susceptible d’émotions nobles et tendres.” Stendhal, “Salon de 1824,” in Salons, 91. “Sous les traits de l’esclave dont une affreuse douleur agite les membres palpitants, c’est le noble Britannicus que nous voyons expirer.” Stendhal, “Salon de 1824,” in Salons, 89–90. Thiers said that the slave prefigures and guarantees the swift death of Britannicus and is dominated by him: “This slave who dies submissively” is also “this Britannicus whose death can be seen in the death of the slave” ([C]et esclave qui expire sans révolte [est aussi] ce Britannicus dont on voit la mort dans celle de l’esclave). Thiers, “Salon de 1824,” Le Constitutionnel, 30 Aug. 1824, in Adolphe Thiers, 152. I’ve quoted selectively from this passage: “Dans l’enfance on nous prononçait des mots; ce mots se fixaient dans notre mémoire, et le sens dans notre entendement, ou par une idée, ou par une image; et cette idée ou image était accompagnée d’aversion, de haine, de

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plaisir, de terreur, de désir, d’indignation, de mépris; pendant un assez grand nombre d’années, à chaque mot prononcé, l’idée ou l’image nous revenait avec la sensation qui lui était propre; mais à la langue nous en avons usé avec les mots, comme avec les pièces de monnaie: nous ne regardons plus à l’empreinte, à la légende, au cordon, pour en connaître la valeur; nous les donnons et nous les recevons à la forme et au poids: ainsi les mots, vous dis-je. Nous avons laissé là de côté l’idée ou l’image pour nous en tenir au son et à la l’images pour nous en tenir au son et à la sensation. Un discours prononcé n’est plus qu’une longue suite de sons et de sensations primitivement excités. Le cœur et les oreilles sone en jeu, l’esprit n’y est plus; c’est à l’effet successif de ces sensations, à leur violence, à leur somme que nous nous entendons et jugeons. Et que fait le philosophe qui pèse, s’arrête, analyse, décompose? il revient par le soupçon, le doute, à l’état de l’enfance … [V]ous n’approuverez l’éloge ou la critique que j’en ferai que d’après la mémoire de la sensation que vous en aurez primitivement éprouvée, et ainsi de tous les morceaux de peinture du Salon, et de tous les objets de la nature, Pourquoi met-on si fortement l’imagination de l’enfant en jeu, si difficilement celle de l’homme fait? C’est que l’enfant à chaque mot recherché l’image, l’idée; il regarde dans sa tête.” See Diderot: Salons, Jean Seznec and Jean Adhémar, eds., vol. 3 (Oxford, 1963), 155. As Anderson has pointed out, by the 1760s, the “work of physicists such as [Pierre-Simon] Laplace and chemists such as [Antoine] Lavoisier was already changing the definition of the relationship between precision and truth in experimental observation to a [new kind of] mode.” The convergence between precise recording and truth would become science’s modern face: one in which “observations are facts.” These stringent standards—observations were expected to be utterly reliable and neutral—elevated science to “intrinsically absolutist” status. The immense sincerity and ambition in the Traité des sensations (1754) included a wish for language to take on the dispassionate certainties contemporary innovators had earned for science. In a discussion that locates a complex history—both prior to and after Rousseau—for the modern (although currently changing) notion of a reader imagined as anonymous, the most relevant section is Anderson’s discerning of Robespierre’s extremely tailored, pedagogical use of Condillac’s comprehensive, earnest program for language. Robespierre wanted to rid citizenship of claims to individuality, a notion he extricated from its association with private life. In school programs and in public festivals, children were claimed by the Republic, but so too were adults who been tainted already by retardataire notions of individuality. Wilda Anderson, “Error in Buffon,” Modern Language Notes, 114 (Sept. 1999), 700; Anderson, “Is the General Will Anonymous?: (Rousseau, Robespierre, Condorcet),” MLN, 126 (Sept. 2011), 845–7. René Girard, “The Red and the Black (1965),” reprinted in Harold Bloom, ed., Stendhal: Modern Cultural Views (New York, 1989), 61. The same source had also been tapped by d’Alembert, Diderot’s collaborator to the Encyclopédie—and this is probably at the heart of the vast differences separating the two prefaces to the Encyclopédie. Wilda Anderson, Diderot’s Dream (Baltimore, 1990), 56–8, 108–12. Condillac wanted to see in language, and in man-made structures of knowledge, the kind of given, inevitable, organization, which he attributed to natural processes. This appealing, but enormously

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time-consuming effort required a forced equilibrium between “Descartes and Locke, to provide a synthesis of the Cartesian ‘natural’ methodical reasoning with the theory of ‘natural’ sense data-based thought.” Anderson, Diderot’s Dream, 79, 83. Anderson has shown how the success of Lavoisier’s nomenclature— which achieved such an interlocking order for chemistry—inspired the Revolutionary committees on education. Anderson, “Is the General Will Anonymous?” MLN, 845–7. Lavoisier’s nomenclature was taken as ballast for this Revolutionary aim. And Lavoisier had taken his cues, in the first place, from Condillac. Language’s potential to function as a self-regulating system could be released. Ibid. I need to correct an impression conjured by my sketch of the laudatory state of openness mentioned in that passage from the “Salon.” My emphasis on Diderot’s attention to why we grow so averse to unpredictability as based on a reading of one specific passage doesn’t mean that I subscribe to a version of Diderot, one whose writings, according to Colas Duflo, embraces notions of chance, randomness, and spontaneity. With the interpretative familiarity and appeal of these categories inextricably bound to notions originating in twentieth-century traditions in French, though, they add descriptive flavor at best. Colas Duflo, Diderot philosophe (Paris, 2003). For further remarks on this approach, see Clorinda Donato, review of Andrew Clark, Diderot’s Part (Aldershot, 2008), in French Studies: A Quarterly Review, 65 (Apr. 2011): 247–8. See also however, the praise for Duflo in James Fowler, “Diderot,” French Studies, 67 (Jul. 2013): 386. “Difficulté de la peinture et de l’art dramatique.” In this text, the chapters are often short and sometimes rather jumpy; this chapter (no. 98) exemplifies both characteristics. Stendhal, Histoire de la peinture en Italie, 260–1. “On ne voit les passions … avec les yeux du corps … Leurs effets seuls sont visibles.” Stendhal chose a scene from near the end of The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) when Werther’s suicide is discovered. Stendhal’s comments on the power of the moment of discovery tax the painter or writer to make apprehensible the cause: “M. Muzart [sic] comes into the bedroom of this handsome young man, and sees him lying on his bed; but the emotions that led Werther to kill himself, how will he see them?” (M. Muzart vient dans la chambre de ce beau jeune homme, et le voit posé sur son lit; mais les mouvements qui ont porté Werther à se tuer, où les verra-t-il?) The moment of finding sets in process a revisiting of anterior events: Werther’s emotional descent is registered by the dramatic effect—the final, single image—of his body lying on the bed. This entire meditation resonates with the nature of Stendhal’s inquiry into the effect of Locusta’s gesture. Ibid., 260. “Tous les jours on voit un jeune homme de vingt ans arriver de province. Ce sont bien les couleurs les plus fraîches; c’est la plus belle santé … Quant au bon air, sans l’oisiveté des cours, sans l’ennui, sans l’amour, sans l’immense superflu, sans la noblesse héréditaire, sans les charmes de la société, je crains bien qu’on ne s’en fût jamais avisé.” Ibid., 309, 314. Pierre-François Maine de Biran’s meditation on habit, Mémoire sur l’influence de l’habitude sur la faculté de penser, appeared in 1803. One specific connection between Stendhal and Maine de Biran is provided by the latter’s Mémoire sur la décomposition de la pensée (1804)

Delacroix and his Forgotten World

because this work discusses the idéologues’ views on the scientific organization of the mind. Throughout his writings and particularly in the Vie de Henry Brulard, Stendhal refers to his admiration for Destutt de Tracy, a leading idéologue. What can be said briefly is that François-Pierre-Gonthier Maine de Biran’s work can help us understand the response to certain kinds of action depicted or evoked in the Locusta (and in general, in paintings of the 1820s and beyond). Locusta’s action (as interpreted by Stendhal) resonates with Maine de Biran’s sense of continuum. Pierre-François Maine de Biran, Mémoire sur l’influence de l’habitude sur la faculté de penser (Paris, 1803), reprint Paris, 1954; and Stendhal, Vie de Henry Brulard, Henri Martineau, ed. (Paris, 1949), 22. Written in 1836, the Vie de Henry Brulard was first edited by Casimir Stryienski (Paris, 1890) but this edition is considered faulty and Martineau’s edition is taken as the standard text. For a discussion of the idéologues, their eighteenth-century roots, and their fraught position in regard to Napoleon, see Louis Bergeron, France Under Napoleon, trans. R.R. Palmer (Princeton, 1981), 90–8. 29. “[L]es sentiments passionnés … dans le courant de la vie habituelle, dorment au fond du coeur de l’homme.” Ibid., 46. 30. Maine de Biran, Mémoire sur l’influence de l’habitude sur la faculté de penser (Paris, 1803; reprint 1954), 31. “Cette homme [Romulus] combat pour son trône et pour sa vie … et pourtant il ne songe qu’à faire le superbe, à nous montrer ses beaux muscles, et à déployer de la grâce à lancer un trait.” Stendhal, “Salon de 1824,” 46. The quote given also highlights the extent to which Stendhal’s dislike was prompted by Romulus’s playing at being in battle: “There is not one of our soldiers who, obscurely fighting to win the respect of his company, and certainly without any personal hate against the enemy he attacks, does not have twenty times more expression” (Il n’y a pas un de nos soldats qui, en se battant obscurément, pour être estimé de sa compagnie, et sans nulle haîne personnelle assurément contre l’ennemi qu’il attaque, n’ait vingt fois plus d’expression). Stendhal’s customary vigilance about persuasive expression and context is here abetted by his awareness of warfare as a matter of the campaign and the company: war is a continuous, group effort with the opponent a distant consideration. His judgment rings with the truth of his own experience of the Napoleonic campaigns (he served in Italy from 1800 to 1801 and again in Russia in 1812). Romulus’s showy musculature offended Stendhal’s causal criteria: his experience of warfare showed that the campaign built stamina and endurance rather than muscle. These less obvious but more important virtues carried the day. (In addition, Stendhal claimed that he associated strength in a person with slow-wittedness. Stendhal, Histoire, 324.) That the gap between the soldier’s experience and the beautifully posed figure of Romulus in battle is part of the reason for the extent of Stendhal’s contempt for this figure is also brought out in comments by Alfred de Vigny in his memoirs of the Napoleonic era. Having noted that the French “ridicule affectation” more than anyone else, Vigny remarks that this reaches a particular pitch of intolerance in the soldier hardened by the horrors of war where the “hatred of exaggeration is pushed very far indeed.” The old soldier is never found “looking for attention in the drawing rooms by striking a tragic attitude” (L’affectation est ridicule en France plus que partout ailleurs … [Dans] la profession des armes [o]n y pousse loin

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35.

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37. 38.

la haine de l’exagération … On ne les [les hommes expérimenté dans la guerre] voyait jamais cherchant à se faire remarquer dans les salons par une tragique attitude). Alfred de Vigny, Servitude et grandeur militaires (Paris, 1845); reprint in Oeuvres complètes, 2 vols., eds. François Germain, André Jarry, and Alphonse Bouvet (Paris, 1986), 2: 766, 767. “Je trouve des personnages impassibles [i.e., in an unnamed, contemporary Davidian painting] à peu près comme le Romulus du tableau des Sabines de M. David.” Stendhal, “Salon de 1824,” in Salons. “[L]es hommes entièrement nus … Le plus simple bon sens indique que les jambes de tels soldats seraient bientôt tout en sang.” Stendhal, “Salon de 1824,” 141, 142. As we’ve seen, this enthusiasm retreats when Stendhal exasperatedly comments that the painting itself disappoints: he only “find[s] a pastiche of the Carracci, or if you like, the portrait of an excellent actress who can play very well the role of maternal despair” (je trouve un pastiche des Carraches, ou, si l’on veut, le portrait d’une excellente actrice qui joue fort bien le désespoir maternel). Stendhal, “Salon de 1824,” 85. “Les louanges du public m’ont indiqué un épisode du Massacre des innocents, la figure d’une mère qui cherche à sauver son fils de la rage des bourreaux en l’empêchant de jeter des cris.” When Stendhal examined the painting, he found the “actress.” Ibid. Claude Reichler’s article on Talma as Nero sheds interesting light on the actor’s decision to play the part in 1824. Reichler asserts that Talma’s main contribution to the dramatic tradition in France was a new veracity of costume and décor. While Reichler’s claim seems rather generalized, he underlines the strength of Talma’s belief in the ability of historically appropriate costume to transport the audience, which may then have been part of the reason Talma felt that he could return to the role of Nero. Claude Reichler, “Talma en Néron dans Britannicus,” Saggi e ricerche di letteratura francese, 29 (1990): 168–9. “[L]e tremblement des poignets, la démarche affectée …” Stendhal, Souvenirs d’égotisme, 99. For François Kerlouégan, Stendhal pined for the standards of achievement set by Renaissance masters; his admiration for Masaccio and other exemplars compensated, in Kerlouégan’s view, for the great disappointments represented by avant-garde French painting. Kerlouégan, “Stendhal Critique d’art: La Question du genre pictural dans Critique amère du Salon de 1824,” Polifonia, 20 (Jul.–Dec. 2013), 32–48, especially 37. See periodicoscientificos.ufmt.br, accessed 29 Jul. 2014.

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Notes to Envoi

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Here I would particularly mention Ralph Ubl’s work in progress, whose working title, as of this writing (Aug. 2014) is Eugène Delacroix: Painting Comes from Afar. Siegfried, Ingres: Painting Reimagined (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009). I am only conjuring what would have to be a more complex argument. Ingres obsessively rendered details, remarkable anatomy, and minute attention to costume, all of which were ways of escaping the burden of and of recalibrating the Davidian dramatic moment. Lacking the ability to constructively teach and thereby faire école, Delacroix retreated into himself. Ingres, on the other hand, continued to teach, so in that sense also their practices are quite different. I do not at all mean this note to be an adequate description of her book, which contains very interesting readings: for example, her discussions of Roger Freeing Angelica and The Imperial Emperor on His Throne of 1806. “Delacroix and the Matter of Finish: Exhibition Symposium,” Santa Barbara Museum of Art, 3 Nov. 2013. I would also like to mention David O’Brien, who was present at the

Delacroix and his Forgotten World

conference, and whose book, tentatively titled Delacroix and Civilization, is in press at the time of this writing (Aug. 2014).

Notes to Appendix 2

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2. 3.

Delacroix received notice of Géricault’s death during the period in which he was painting the Chios, and he recorded the event in his Journal. The years leading to Géricault’s death in 1824 include a complicated series of events, but what can be said briefly, and what is most relevant here, is that these years trace the artist’s gradual decline, including his increasing physical debilitation. In his prime, Géricault was renowned for his sense of energy and vitality, his prowess as a rider, and so on. It was the alarming toll which his decline took on Géricault’s body that shocked Delacroix: he noted the artist’s “bodily strength, warmth, and imagination” (tant de force de corps, tant de feu et d’imagination) as his major characteristics, and he reflected on how wasted Géricault had become in his final illness: “tomorrow the earth will hide what little remained of him” (demain la terre cachera le peu qui est resté de lui). Delacroix, 27 Jan. 1824, Journal, 1:50. Johnson, “Delacroix et Géricault,” 25. Philippe Grunchec, Géricault: dessins et aquarelles de chevaux (Paris, 1982), 8–12. Recently, Patricia Mainardi has taken the biographical line of inquiry into Géricault’s work in its most detailed and focused direction to date. She investigates a particular theme in a wide cultural context and knits the biographical detail into this set of circumstances. On the other hand, Johnson’s general references and Grunchec’s literal transpositions rely on a traditional notion of biography. Patricia Mainardi, “Mazeppa,” Word and Image, 16 (Oct.–Dec. 2000): 335–51. A sustained, wide-ranging, and important discussion of the depiction and role of the horse in nineteenth-century French painting has been undertaken by Gotlieb. He pursues an ambitious line of argument that takes account of the enormous importance the depiction of the horse assumed as the locus for the competing demands of the general and the particular, demands which reached a point of crisis in the tradition of the nude. To quote Gotlieb: Neither the nude nor the clothed figure could satisfy the twin, and as it now seemed, contradictory demands for order and historicity. But the horse, effectively an integral component of figure painting, seemed uniquely accommodated to those twin demands. The horse served as both individual and type … to put it another way, the horse was able to assimilate itself to a given context without completely delivering itself to that context. Perhaps no Romantic painting more plainly attests to the horse’s new status as a stable vehicle of reform than Horace Vernet’s Studio of 1820 … [I]t is first of all a representation of Vernet’s studio [and it] announces a revisionist naturalism whose chief instrument was neither a nude, nor a clothed model, but a live horse. I do not go into Gotlieb’s argument in my discussion here, but his attention to the importance of horse painting in the reform of advanced painting in the nineteenth century informs my emphasis on the vital role the figure of the horse plays in the overall effect of the Chios.

Gotlieb, The Plight of Emulation, 159, 155–84. Géricault “retroactively acquire[d] the traditional formation he had denied himself as a young student.” I have emphasized Crow’s disappointment with the embrace of the Salon system in the 1820s by young painters who, unlike Géricault, had dispensed with Davidian drawing; in the same period, the Davidian tradition was seen as badly compromised by contemporary Davidian painting. In terms of Crow’s argument, the salient fact is that the drawing skills of the contemporary Davidians were not in doubt. By no means can Davidian drawing be taken as an immutable standard of excellence in the 1820s. In addition, it might even be said that Crow does not fully address Géricault’s singularity by setting the Raft as the perfected representative of the Davidian tradition, with the narrative of his self-fashioning echoing the earlier biographical arcs of Girodet and Jean-Germain Drouais (1763–88). However, Crow acknowledges the difficult negotiation he attempts: “Of [Géricault’s] startling singularity as an artist and personality there can be no dispute, but singularity is itself a quality that must be put together from bits and pieces of already existing models.” See, for example, the repeated tropes of appearance, clothes, and hairstyles in the biographies of these young painters. Crow, “Classicism in Crisis,” 62; and Emulation, 281, 279, 220–3. 5. “Géricault and Delacroix had between them something of the same tense combination of filiation and rivalry that had existed within the circle of David.” Crow, “Classicism in Crisis,” 68. 6. Ibid., 71. 7. See Fried’s discussion of this painting in Courbet’s Realism, 24. 8. As mentioned, Crow indirectly refers to the terms of Bloom’s arguments on the nature of poetic originality, where the notions of influence and priority play crucial roles. For example, Crow refers to Géricault’s innovations as follows: “his … reversals of theme and technique … were precisely the means by which a continuity could be figured in light of the vastly different circumstances … under which the latecomer was forced to assert his right of succession.” Crow, Emulation, 281. See Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence, 14–6, 77–92; and Gotlieb, The Plight of Emulation, 4–8. 9. Crow, Emulation, 220–3. 10. Ibid., 283–7. See also Crow, “Classicism in Crisis,” 59–62. In addition, the horse, rather than the rider, was the focus of extensive development in the preparatory drawings. Géricault changed the direction in which the horse was depicted, from charging straight ahead to a contrapposto movement, thereby giving the horse greater solidity and weight. 11. Boulanger’s painting is now in the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Rouen where it appears darkened and in poor condition. Mainardi says that this Mazeppa was “enthusiastically received” and emphasizes that Boulanger won a “second-class medal, a major achievement for a 23-year-old neophyte.” Its immediate reception among the critics was 4.

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rather more mixed but a Salon success it undoubtedly was, largely because of Boulanger’s rendition of a dramatic moment. The achievement of that moment in paint is dependent on pushing the impression of an extraordinary degree of physical strain. The painting’s success in these terms is underscored by what Mainardi says about its longterm reputation: it came to be seen, she says, as a kind of epitome of Romanticism. As Boulanger’s career went on, his painting descended into increasingly hyperbolic exercises in the vein of Mazeppa. Mainardi, “Mazeppa,” 344–5. “[L]e cheval sauvage … frémit et frappe la terre du pied … Nous trouvons la figure couchée un peu lâchée de dessin: le motif n’est peut-être pas très bon. Sans doute cet homme a été blessé par les trépignemen[t]s du cheval; mais pourquoi s’en tient-il encore si près? C’est d’ailleurs un repoussoir usé: M. Boulanger doit sentir la nullité de ces moyens communs.” Anon., “Figaro au Salon,” Le Figaro 12, 12 Jan. 1828, 2. Crow, “Classicism in Crisis,” 71. Johnson uses the phrase “clumsy homages” to arbitrate Delacroix’s versions of the Mazeppa story as “following” Géricault. Johnson, “Delacroix et Géricault,” 30. Mainardi draws out very well the way in which the subject was “the inspiration for so much literature and art,” and how the inspiration changed, depending on different nationalities and political contexts. Mainardi, “Mazeppa,” 335, 336–47. Mainardi stresses the biographical appropriateness of the Mazeppa subject for both Géricault and Delacroix. She draws a parallel with the love affairs of both artists, and she discusses the new strictures of the Napoleonic code, and the victimized status of Mazeppa as male but also feminized. She provides a reflective example of the uses of biography by focusing on one episode in a detailed social and political context. Johnson alludes to the fact that Géricault was on his deathbed in 1824 but his comments on biography remain circumspect in the extreme. For example, he notes briefly that Géricault’s attraction to the Mazeppa story has “often been interpreted as a reference to his own suffering, which was largely due to his habit of riding difficult stallions.” Johnson, “Delacroix et Géricault,” 30. A maudlin conflation of Mazeppa’s punishment with the biography of Géricault has often been rehearsed, and shows the ease with which the artist’s biography and the image of the horse are fused. For examples of the latter, see Denise Aimé-Azam, Mazeppa, Géricault et son temps (Paris: Plon, 1956). See Mainardi’s discussion of Géricault and Mazeppa, and associated references. Mainardi, “Mazeppa,” 338–341, 349, n. 34. Mainardi emphasizes how this aspect of the Mazeppa legend was “historically dubious” but eclipsed “any other aspect of Mazeppa’s career” for the “Romantic generation.” Mainardi, “Mazeppa,” 336. The small number of figures was praised by the Figaro critic as concentrating the effect of the scene, giving it “an air of the terrible” ([L]e petit nombre de spectateurs donn[e] du terrible à cette exécution). Anon., “Figaro au Salon,” 2. Its reduced number of figures, concentrated dramatic moment, and strong chiaroscuro relate Boulanger’s painting to nouvelle école characteristics. The narrative of the Mazeppa legend calls for an extremely small and tightly bound figural group: compare this to, for example, Cogniet’s Massacre of the Innocents. It is important to note that the major elements of Boulanger’s scene had previously been explored and abandoned by Géricault. His

Delacroix and his Forgotten World

19.

20.

21.

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23. 24.

1817–8 series of preparatory studies for his projected history painting based on the Race of the Riderless Horses begins with a focus on the start of the Barberini race in Rome’s via del Corso where the wild horses are goaded to a frenzy by grooms, but the series does not continue with depictions of that moment. The focus of Géricault’s scenes and Boulanger’s Mazeppa narrative is the public arena at the beginning of each ride. It might be speculated that Géricault discovered that this particular moment—fevered, accelerated—harbored, as it were, too much potential for energy and power. See, for example, the two versions by Géricault: the Race of the Riderless Horses (1817; Winterthur Collection) and the second one, which shares the same title (1818; Musée des Beaux-Arts, Lille). See Lorenz Eitner, Géricault: His Life and Work (London, 1983), 118, fig. 105; 302, pl. 21. The front legs of Boulanger’s horse do not kick outwards in the way that the legs of the Chasseur’s horse do. But the arc of the back and neck of the horse in the Mazeppa is just as steeply marked. Mainardi emphasizes that the solitary, punished, suffering figure is highlighted by both Géricault and Delacroix, while Byron’s poem stressed the extremity of the ride. Mainardi differentiates between the public and private focus in the different versions of the Mazeppa story and says that “Boulanger’s and also Horace Vernet’s version of Mazeppa appear much more in the realm of the public.” She adds that “while Géricault and Delacroix both invested Mazeppa with biographical meaning and never exhibited these small and moving testimonials to personal experience, Horace Vernet and Louis Boulanger exhibited large-scale public Mazeppa paintings in the Salon of 1827 … where they became rallying points for the liberal opposition.” Regarding Boulanger’s canvas, Mainardi says that: “in a narrative sense Boulanger’s Mazeppa is the most complete of all the versions. Its composition, seemingly crowded and fragmented, is the only one which represents the dialectic of the event: the struggle between youth and age … [I]t should be recognized that this painting is the most complete in terms of an external narrative, just as the Géricault’s, pared down of all extraneous elements, is the most complete in terms of an internal reality.” This is a thought-provoking but particular opinion, arising from a determining split between the public, politicized realm and the domain of the private and biographical. Mainardi, “Mazeppa,” 342, 345. In a Journal entry of 1824, Delacroix describes himself as torn between a number of different subjects, suggesting that the theme of Mazeppa was one of several favored by him in this period: “I have been torn between Mazeppa, Don Juan, Tasso, and a hundred other subjects for an hour” (Je suis, depuis une heure, à balancer entre Mazeppa, Don Juan, le Tasse, et cent autres). Delacroix, 11 Apr. 1824, Journal, 1:73. The wild horse swims the wilder stream! The bright broad river’s gushing tide Sweeps, winding onward, far and wide. Byron, Mazeppa, 15.582–4, in Robert F. Gleckner, ed., The Poetical Works of Byron (Boston, 1975), 412. Eitner also remarks on this color, even though he discounts the Mazeppa works by Géricault as not particularly “impressive or original.” Eitner, Géricault, 261. Johnson, “Delacroix et Géricault,” 30. The oil sketch looks extremely darkened; it’s in the Mahmoud Khalil Museum, Cairo. According to Johnson, who located the oil sketch

25. 26. 27.

28.

29. 30.

31.

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and dated the Mazeppa series to 1824, it is in poor condition: “While it is fortunate for the preservation of the inscription and of the more thickly applied impasto on the painted surface that it has never been relined, the delicate state of the support has resulted in some damage: it has been patched and repainted in a small area on the horse’s back just below Mazeppa’s left thigh, and a spot of sky has recently flaked off the fragile canvas at the top centre. There is also extensive craquelure.” Johnson, “Mazeppa in Giza: a Riddle Solved,” Burlington Magazine 125 (Aug. 1983), 492. Johnson, “Delacroix et Géricault,” 30. Ibid. Mainardi’s discussion of the Mazeppa subject includes a reference to the “effeminization” of Mazeppa’s figure. This might appear to intersect with my argument here about the lightness of the figure depicted in Delacroix’s watercolor. However, Mainardi is referring not to the varying interpretations of the Mazeppa story, but rather to the “homoerotic content of all these Mazeppa images” (in other words, the various paintings by Boulanger, Vernet, Géricault, and Delacroix) based on the tale’s narrative roles. Mazeppa’s “surrogate female status in the eyes of husbands and the law,” for example, taps into the “long tradition in European common law of symbolically transforming the bachelor adulterer into a female … as a prelude to his backward ride.” Mainardi’s emphasis on the biographical suffering of the solitary Mazeppa subject springs from the same root: “the Romantic artist’s self-identification as victim, replacing and excluding the female.” Mainardi, “Mazeppa,” 345. Byron, Mazeppa 15.604, in The Poetical Works of Byron, 412. These lines are misquoted by Eitner in his discussion of this painting by Géricault: “repelling” becomes “repellant.” Eitner, Géricault, 261. Grimaldo Grigsby, “Aspasie and Delacroix’s Massacres of Chios,” 682. In fact, it is reminiscent of the way the horse in the Chios rears up but also tucks in its rearing right front leg. These two horses share a similar light-stepping, nervous gait. Emphasis added. “Voilà les dernières ruines de l’ancien romantisme— voilà ce que c’est que de venir dans un temps où il est reçu de croire que l’inspiration suffit et remplace le reste;—voilà l’abîme où mène la course désordonnée de Mazeppa.” Baudelaire, “Salon de 1845,” in Curiosités esthétiques, 27; English translation from “Salon of 1845,” in Baudelaire, Art in Paris, 13. After 1827, Boulanger explored increasingly frenzied variations on melodramatic themes. As part of his discussion of Boulanger in 1845, Baudelaire accused Victor Hugo (a favorite target of Baudelaire’s) of destroying Boulanger’s work. Baudelaire laid the blame at Hugo’s door, but while Boulanger certainly did much work inspired by Hugo’s writings, Boulanger’s relation to Hugo is also part of a larger context. It may have exacerbated the extremities already marked in his Mazeppa painting and specified by the Figaro critic. Ibid. Théophile Silvestre (1823–76) described Delacroix as possessing a “frail constitution enlivened by the vigor of his nerves” like the “little rearing horse in the Massacre at Chios” ([l]a frêle constitution de l’artiste est relevée par la vigueur de ses nerfs … comme ce petit cheval cabré dans le Massacre de Scio). Silvestre’s images are fanciful but telling, because they involve change and movement—right up to the sense of boneless lightness that buoys Delacroix’s figures of horses.

Théophile Silvestre, Histoire des Artistes vivants, français et étrangers (Paris: Blanchard, 1857), 47. Referring to two aquatints dating from around the same year as the Chios, entitled Turk Saddling His Horse (c.1824; Bibliothèque Nationale de France; Delteil-Strauber 9) and Turk Mounting His Horse (c.1824; Bibliothèque Nationale de France; Delteil-Strauber 11), Burty commented on the differences between these depictions of the horse compared to Géricault’s approach. Commenting upon the second print, Burty said that “[i]n terms of its detail, this work is distinctively [Delacroix’s], even if its overall sense is that of Géricault. But the twisting movement of the male figure, the shifting facets of the horse’s chest, and its highly strung head … remain unmistakable” (Cette pièce est très personnelle quant au détail, bien que la donnée générale soit dans le sens de Géricault. Mais le mouvement de torsion de l’homme, les plans multipliés de la poitrine du cheval et la tête nerveuse … ne permettent pas d’hésiter). Burty’s commentary is quoted by Jobert, but he does not provide a source or a date for this description. I have failed to locate it among Burty’s writings, although he does make some similar (if less extensive) remarks on Delacroix’s depiction of horses in an introduction he wrote to a selection of Delacroix’s correspondence. Burty had an exceptional interest in and perceptive response to printmaking, and was named in Delacroix’s will as one of the executors of his studio sale. Jobert, Delacroix, le trait romantique, exhibition catalog (Paris: Bibliothèque nationale de France, 6 Apr.–12 Jul. 1998), 76. Philippe Burty, “Eugène Delacroix au Maroc,” in Maîtres et petits maîtres (Paris, 1877), 55, 61. See Fried’s discussion of Burty’s important involvement in Manet’s career in the 1860s and his role as an early and energetic supporter of impressionism. Fried, Manet’s Modernism, 306, 340, 461, n. 44.

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Select Bibliography This bibliography is divided as follows: 1. Primary Source Material A. Delacroix’s Writings B. Art Criticism, Salon of 1822 C. Art Criticism, Salon of 1824 D. Art Criticism, Salon of 1827–28 E. Art Criticism, Salons of 1831, 1834 F. Later Art Criticism G. Other Primary Source Material 2. Secondary Source Material A. Catalogs of Delacroix’s Works B. Exhibition Catalogs C. Secondary Literature The notes to the text should also be consulted for additional information and sources not listed here. I have not attempted to include every example of Salon criticism: in the case of an individual review by a particular critic that appeared in installments in a newspaper or journal, I list selected installments, rather than provide complete records of every entry. A full bibliography of Salon criticism, which includes the years referred to here, is found in Neil McWilliam (ed.), A Bibliography of Salon Criticism in Paris from the Ancien Régime to the Restoration, 1699–1827 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), and again McWilliam (ed.), A Bibliography of Salon Criticism in Paris from the July Monarchy to the Second Republic 1831–1851 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).

1 Primary Source Material A. Delacroix’s Writings Delacroix, Eugène. Journal d’Eugène Delacroix. 2 vols. Ed. Michèle Hannoosh (Paris: José Corti, 2009). ——. Correspondance générale. 5 vols. Ed. André Joubin (Paris: Plon, 1936–8). ——. Lettres intimes. Ed. Alfred Dupont (Paris: Gallimard, 1954). ——. Ecrits sur l’art. Eds. François-Marie Deyrolle and Christophe Denissel (Paris: Séguier, 1988). ——. Dictionnaire des Beaux–Arts, 1857–1862. Ed. Anne Larue (Paris: Hermann, 1996).

B. Art Criticism, Salon of 1822 Coupin, Pierre-Alexandre [“P.A.”]. “Notice sur l’exposition des tableaux en 1822.” Revue encyclopédique 14 (May 1822): 248–54; 15 (Sep. 1822): 452–68; 16 (Oct. 1822): 11–32. Delécluze, Etienne-Jean [“E.J.D.”]. “Salon de 1822.” Moniteur universel 123 (3 May 1822): 673–4; 128 (8 May 1822): 693–94; 138 (18 May 1822): 733–4; 144 (24 May 1822): 757–8; 149 (29 May 1822): 773–4; 152 (1 Jun. 1822): 785–6; 156 (5 Jun. 1822): 801–2. Stendhal [“D.N.K.”]. “Exposition de tableaux au Louvre.” Paris Monthly Review of British and Continental Literature (May 1822); reprint in Stendhal, Salons. Eds. Stéphane Guégan and Martine Reid, 47–53 (Paris: Gallimard, 2002). Thiers, Adolphe [“T … rs, A.”]. “Salon de 1822.” Le Constitutionnel (25 Apr.–15 May 1822); reprint in Thiers, Adolphe Thiers, Critique d’art: Salons de 1822 et de 1824. Ed. Marie-Claude Chaudonneret, 47–143 (Paris, Champion, 2005).

C. Art Criticism, Salon of 1824 Anon. [“L’Amateur sans prétention”]. “Salon de 1824.” Le Mercure du dix-neuvième siècle 6 (1824): 373–83, 414–24, 445–60; 7 (1824): 54–64, 145–58, 199–210, 291–300, 483–97. Anon. [“E.D.”]. “Musée royal.” La Pandore 416 (2 Sep. 1824): 2–3; 421 (7 Sep. 1824): 2–3. Anon. [“S.”]. “Salon de 1824.” Le Diable boiteux 241 (28 Aug. 1824): 2–3; 243 (30 Aug. 1824): 2; 247 (3 Sep. 1824): 2–3; 251 (7 Sep. 1824): 2–3; 255 (11 Sep. 1824): 2–3; 257 (13 Sep. 1824): 2–3. Anon. “Le Salon de 1824.” Feuilleton littéraire 158 (8 Jul. 1824): 2; 180 (30 Aug. 1824): 2; 181 (31 Aug. 1824): 2–3; 184 (3 Sep. 1824): 2. Anon. [Thiers, Adolphe]. “Salon de 1824.” See Thiers, Adolphe. Aycard, Marie, and Ferdinand Flocon. Salon de mil huit cent vingt-quatre (Paris: A. Leroux, 1824). Chauvin, Auguste. Salon de mil huit cent vingt-quatre (Paris: Pillet ainé, 1825). Coupin, Pierre-Alexandre [“P.A.”]. “Notice sur l’exposition des tableaux en 1824.” Revue encyclopédique 23 (Sep. 1824): 551–60; 24 (Oct. 1824): 18–40; 25 (Nov. 1824): 287–304. Delécluze, Etienne-Jean [“D.”]. “Exposition du Louvre 1824.” Journal des débats 11 Sep. 1824: 1–2; 5 Oct.

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1824: 1–2; 18 Oct. 1824: 1–3; 30 Nov. 1824: 1–3; 12 Dec. 1824: 1–3. Jal, Auguste. L’Artiste et le philosophe, entretiens critiques sur le Salon de 1824 (Paris: Ambroise Dupont, 1824). Landon, Charles-Paul. Salon de 1824. Recueil des principales productions des artistes vivants exposées au Salon du Louvre, le 25 août 1824 (Paris: Annales du Musée, 1824). Pillet, Fabien [“N.B.F.P.”]. Une matinée au Salon, ou les peintres de l’école passés en revue, critique des tableaux et sculptures de l’exposition de 1824 (Paris: Delaunay, 1824). Rabbe, Alphonse. “Ouverture de Salon. Premier coup d’oeil.” Le Courrier français 239–40 (26–7 Aug. 1824): 4. ——. “Beaux-Arts: Abel de Pujol.” Le Courrier français 242 (29 Aug. 1824): 4. ——. “Beaux-Arts: MM. Scheffer, Schnetz.” Le Courrier français 244 (31 Aug. 1824): 4. ——. “Beaux-Arts: MM. Blondel, Camindade, et Gaillot.” Le Courrier français 245 (2 Sep. 1824): 3–4. ——. “Beaux-Arts: Sujets contemporains-Batailles. Vernet. Lejeune.” Le Courrier français 249 (6 Sep. 1824): 3–4. ——. “Beaux-Arts: MM. Delacroix, Allaux et Lancrenon.” Le Courrier français 253 (9 Sep. 1824): 4. ——. “Beaux-Arts: Serment des trois Suisses de M. Steuben.” Le Courrier français 256 (12 Sep. 1824): 3–4. ——. “Beaux-Arts: M. Sigalon.” Le Courrier français 259 (15 Sep. 1824): 4. ——. “Beaux-Arts: MM. Lethière, Paulin Guérin.” Le Courrier français 270 (26 Sep. 1824): 3–4. Stendhal [“A.”]. “Critique amère du Salon de 1824 par M. Van Eube de Molkirk.” Journal de Paris et des départements (29 Aug.–24 Dec. 1824); reprint in Stendhal, Salons. Eds. Stéphane Guégan and Martine Reid, 55–148. (Paris: Gallimard, 2002). Thiers, Adolphe [unsigned]. “Salon de 1824.” Le Constitutionnel (25 Aug.–19 Oct. 1824); reprint in Thiers, Adolphe Thiers, Critique d’art: Salons de 1822 et de 1824. Ed. Marie-Claude Chaudonneret, 145–95 (Paris, Champion, 2005). —— [writing as Thiers]. “Direction des Arts et particulière la peinture en France.” “Peinture française.” Revue européenne 1 (1824); reprint in Thiers, Adolphe Thiers, Critique d’art: Salons de 1822 et de 1824. Ed. Marie-Claude Chaudonneret, 233–8; 239–53 (Paris, Champion, 2005). —— [writing as “Y.”].“Exposition de 1824.” Le Globe (17 Sep.–16 Oct. 1824); reprint in Thiers, Adolphe Thiers, Critique d’art: Salons de 1822 et de 1824. Ed. Marie-Claude Chaudonneret,197–232 (Paris, Champion, 2005). Viellard, Pierre-Ange. Salon de 1824. Revue des ouvrages de peinture, sculpture, etc. (Paris: Pillet ainé, 1825).

D. Art Criticism, Salon of 1827–28 “A.N.” “Beaux-Arts: Musée du Louvre.” L’Observateur 91 (24 Nov. 1827): 437–39; 92 (1 Dec. 1827): 454–7; 95 (24 Dec. 1827): 466–9. Anon. [Rabbe, Alphonse]. “Exposition de 1827.” Le Courrier français 310 (6 Nov. 1827): 4; 315 (11 Nov. 1827): 4; 351 (17 Dec. 1827): 4. Anon. “Exposition de 1827.” Journal des artistes 21 (19 Nov. 1827): 729–37; 22 (25 Nov. 1827): 745–53; 23

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(2 Dec. 1827): 761–8; 1 (6 Jan. 1828): 2–4; 2 (13 Jan. 1828): 17–20; 3 (20 Jan. 1828): 33–6; 4 (27 Jan. 1828): 52–6; 6 (10 Feb. 1828): 81–4; 7 (17 Feb. 1828): 129–41; 10 (9 Mar. 1828): 145–52; 11 (16 Mar. 1828): 161–8; 12 (23 Mar. 1828): 177–81; 13 (30 Mar. 1828): 193–9; 17 (27 Apr. 1828): 262–3. Anon. “Figaro au Salon.” Le Figaro 290 (4 Nov. 1827): 749–50; 293 (7 Nov. 1827): 763–4; 299 (13 Nov. 1827): 785–6; 385 (19 Nov. 1827): 810–11; 400 (4 Dec. 1827): 870; 429 (15 Dec. 1827): 914–5; 435 (21 Dec. 1827): 938–9; 12 (12 Jan. 1828): 1–2; 38 (7 Feb. 1828): 1–2; 49 (18 Feb. 1828): 2; 120 (29 Apr. 1828): 1–2. Anon. “Résumé du Salon.” L’Observateur des Beaux-Arts 23 (26 Jun. 1828): 89–90. Anon. “Salon de 1827.” Le Corsaire 1568 (10 Nov. 1827): 3; 1575 (17 Nov. 1827): 3; 1605 (14 Dec. 1827): 2. ——. “Salon de 1827 et 1828.” Le Corsaire 1699 (7 Jan. 1828): 2; 1672 (2 Apr. 1828): 2–3. Anon. “Salon de 1827.” Journal du commerce 2876 (11 Nov. 1827): n.p.; 2916 (24 Dec. 1827): n.p.; 2933 (11 Jan. 1828): n.p.; 2936 (14 Jan. 1828): n.p. Anon. “Salon de 1827.” Le Mentor 1350 (23 Oct. 1827): 2; 1370 (7 Nov. 1827): 2–4; 1375 (12 Nov. 1827): 2; 1377 (15 Nov. 1827): 2; 1378 (16 Nov. 1827): 2–3; 1380 (18 Nov. 1827): 2; 1395 (3 Dec. 1827): 2; 1412 (18 Dec. 1827): 2; 1413 (19 Dec. 1827): 2; 1414 (21 Dec. 827): 2; 1415 (22 Dec. 1827): 2. ——. “Salon de 1827 et 1828.” Le Mentor 1459 (3 Jan. 1827): 2; 1468 (8 Feb. 1827): 2; 1503 (17 Feb. 1827): 2; 1506 (20 Feb. 1827): 2–3. Anon. “Salon de 1827.” Nouveau journal de Paris 97 (5 Nov. 1827): 3; 105 (13 Nov. 1827): 3; 109 (17 Nov. 1827): 2–3; 116 (24 Nov. 1827): 3. ——. “Salon de 1828.” Nouveau journal de Paris 119 (7 Feb. 1828): 4; 203 (19 Feb. 1828): 3–4. Anon. [Scheffer, Arnold]. “Salon de 1827.” Revue française 1 (Jan.–Mar. 1828): 188–212. Chauvin, Auguste [“C.H.”]. “Beaux-Arts: Salon.” Le Moniteur universel 330 (26 Nov. 1827): 1629–30; 347 (13 Dec. 1827): 1697–8; 363 (29 Dec. 1827): 1757–8; 16 (16 Jan. 1828): 63–4; 29 (29 Jan. 1828): 112–3; 58 (27 Feb. 1828): 243–4. ——. “Résumé du Salon de 1827.” L’Observateur des Beaux-Arts 1 (6 Apr. 1828): 2–3; 3 (16 Apr. 1828): 9–10; 4 (20 Apr. 1828): 14–5; 5 (24 Apr. 1828): 17–9. Coupin, Pierre-Alexandre [“P.A.”]. “Exposition des tableaux en 1827.” Revue encyclopédique 36 (Nov. 1827): 526–7. “D.” “Tableaux d’histoire.” L’Observateur des Beaux-Arts 7 (5 May 1828): 29–30; 9 (8 May 1828): 33–4. ——. “Résumé du Salon de 1828.” L’Observateur des Beaux-Arts 10 (11 May 1828): 37–8; 13 (23 May 1828): 49–50. Delécluze, Etienne-Jean [“D.”]. “Salon de 1827.” Journal des débats 5 May 1827: 1–2; 16 Dec. 1827: 1–3; 20 Dec. 1827: 1–3; 23 Dec. 1827: 1–3; 31 Dec. 1827: 1–3; 2 Jan. 1828: 1–3; 7 Jan. 1828: 1–2; 10 Jan. 1828: 1–3; 14 Jan. 1828: 1–2; 17 Jan. 1828: 1–3; 1 Mar. 1828: 1–3. Farcy, Charles [“F.”]. “Exposition de 1827.” Journal des artistes 24 (9 Dec. 1827): 772–84. ——. “Examen du Salon de 1827.” Journal des artistes 5 (3 Feb. 1828): 65–8. Jal, Auguste. Esquisses, croquis, pochades, ou tout ce qu’on voudra sur le Salon de 1827 (Paris: Ambroise Dupont, 1828). Rabbe, Alphonse. See Anon. [Rabbe, Alphonse]. “Exposition de 1827.” Scheffer, Arnold. See Anon. [Scheffer, Arnold]. “Salon de 1827.”

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Vitet, Louis [“L.V.”]. “Salon de peinture de 1827.” Le Globe 95 (10 Nov. 1827): 503–5; 13 (22 Dec. 1827): 72–4; 30 (6 Feb. 1828): 179–82; 39 (8 Mar. 1828): 252–5. “Z.” “Salon de 1827.” La Réunion 304 (11 Nov. 1827): 2–3.

E. Art Criticism, Salons of 1831 and 1834 Anon. “Salon de 1831.” Le Constitutionnel 124 (4 May 1831); 144 (24 May 1831). Anon. [Artaud, Nicolas-Louis-Marie]. “Salon de 1831.” Le Courrier français 122 (2 May 1831); 136 (16 May 1831); 139 (19 May 1831). Anon. “Salon de 1831.” Courrier des théâtres 4549 (26 May 1831): 3; 4585 (1 Jul. 1831): 2–3; 4598 (14 Jul. 1831): 3; 4604 (21 Jul. 1831): 2–3. Anon. “Salon de 1831. Examen général, opinion de tous les journaux.” Gazette littéraire 26 (26 May 1831): 401–16. Artaud, Nicolas-Louis-Marie. See Anon. [Artaud, Nicolas-Louis-Marie].“Salon de 1831.” “B.” “Exposition de 1831.” Revue encyclopédique 51 (Jul. 1831): 221–5. Busoni, Philippe [“B., Ph.”]. “Salon de 1834.” L’Artiste 6 (1834): 61–5; 7 (1834): 73–7; 8 (1834): 85–90; 12 (1834): 133–9. Decamps, Alexandre [“D … ”]. Le Musée revue du Salon de 1834 (Paris: Everat, 1834). Delécluze, Etienne-Jean [“D.”]. “Salon de 1831.” Journal des débats (1 May 1831): 2–3; (4 May 1831): 1–2; (7 May 1831): 1–3; (9 May 1831): 1–3; (12 May 1831): 1–2; (14 May 1831): 1–2; (17 May 1831): 1–2; (23 May 1831): 1–3; (26 May 1831): 1–3; (8 Jun. 1831): 1–3; (17 Jun. 1831): 1–3; (23 Jun. 1831). ——. “Salon de 1834.” Journal des débats (2 Mar. 1834): 1–2; (8 Mar. 1834): 1; (16 Mar. 1834): 1–3; (3 Apr. 1834): 1–3. F.S., Melchior. “Lettres sur Paris.” Le Voleur 23 (10 May 1831): n.p. Farcy, Charles [“F.”]. “Les Portraits et les peintres. Dialogue.” Journal des artistes 19 (8 May 1831): 356–8. Haureau, Jean-Barthélémy [“B.H.”]. “Coup d’oeil cynique sur l’exposition: Peinture.” Le Mercure de France au dix-neuvième siècle 33 (1831): 480–6. H. de V. “Salon de 1831.” La France nouvelle 1422 (7 Jul. 1831): n.p. ——. “Salon de 1831.” La France nouvelle 1425 (10 Jul. 1831): n.p. Pillet, Fabien [“F.P.”]. “Salon de 1831.” Le Moniteur universel 126 (6 May 1831): 927–8; 129 (9 May 1831): 939–40; 133 (13 May 1831): 956; 136 (16 May 1831): 968. ——. “Salon de 1834.” Le Moniteur universel 69 (10 Mar. 1834): 533; 76 (17 Mar. 1834): 601–2; 85 (26 Mar. 1834): 709–10; 97 (7 Apr. 1834): 813–14. Rastoin-Bremond, Édouard [“Ed. R.”]. “Salon de 1831.” Gazette littéraire 23 (5 May 1831): 364–5.

F. Later Art Criticism Baudelaire, Charles. Curiosités esthétiques: L’Art romantique et autres oeuvres critiques. Ed. Henri Lemaitre (Paris: Bordas, 1990).

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Baudelaire, Charles. Art in Paris 1845–1862. Trans. and ed. Jonathan Mayne (London: Phaidon Press, 1964). Delécluze, Etienne-Jean [“D.”]. “Salon de 1838.” Journal des débats (3 Mar. 1838): 1–2; (8 Mar. 1838): 1–2; (17 Mar. 1838): 1–2; (27 Apr. 1838): 1–2. Gautier, Théophile. Critique d’art: extraits des Salons (1833–1872). Ed. Marie-Hélène Girard (Paris: Séguier, 1994). Mantz, Paul. “Salon de 1859.” Gazette des Beaux-Arts ser. 1, vol. 1 (May 1859): 129–41. Planche, Gustave. Etudes sur l’école française (1831–1852), Peinture et sculpture. 2 vols. (Paris: Michel Lévy, 1855). Thoré, Théophile. “Artistes contemporains: M. Eugène Delacroix.” Le Siècle (24 Feb. 1837): 1–2. ——. “Artistes contemporains: M. Eugène Delacroix.” Le Siècle (25 Feb. 1837): 1–2. —— [pseud. William Bürger]. Salons de William Bürger: 1861–1868. 2 vols. Paris: Renouard, 1870.

G. Other Primary Source Material Anon. “Britannicus.” Feuilleton littéraire 183 (2 Sep. 1824): 2. Anon. L’Observateur au musée, ou détails exacts des tableaux qui ont enrichi cette belle collection en l’année 1824 et celle précédente (Paris: Chassaignon, 1824). Auger, Louis-Simon. Discours sur le romantisme prononcé dans la séance annuelle des quatres académies du 24 avril 1824. Paris: Didot, 1824; reprint, Receuil factice de manifestes pro et antiromantiques, 3–28 (Geneva: Slatkine, 1974). Burty, Philippe. Maîtres et petits maîtres (Paris: G. Charpentier, 1877). Byron, George Gordon. The Poetical Works of Byron. Ed. Robert F. Gleckner (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1975). Delécluze, Etienne-Jean. Journal de Delécluze 1824–1828. Ed. Robert Baschet (Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1948). ——. Le Mécanicien roi (Paris: Charles Gosselin, 1832); reprint (Paris: Editions Allia, 1995). See also the later edition in Romans, contes et nouvelles, nouvelles éditions, revues et corrigées (Paris: Charpentier, 1845), 527–40. ——. Louis David: son école et son temps, souvenirs (Paris: Didier, 1855); reprint, ed. Jean-Pierre Mouilleseaux (Paris: Macula, 1983). ——. Souvenirs de soixante années (Paris: Michel Lévy, 1862). Diderot, Denis. Oeuvres esthétiques. Ed. Paul Vernière (Paris: Garnier, 1965). ——. Salons. 4 vols. Eds. Jean Seznec and Jean Adhémar (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975). Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim. Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry. Trans. Edward Allen McCormick and with a foreword by Michael Fried (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984). Maine de Biran, Pierre-François. Mémoire sur l’influence de l’habitude sur la faculté de penser (Paris: Henrichs, 1803); reprint (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1954). Piron, E.A. Eugène Delacroix: sa vie et ses oeuvres (Paris: J. Claye, 1865).

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Ravaisson, Félix. De l’Habitude (Paris: H. Fournier, 1838); reprint (Paris: Libraire Philosophique J. Vrin, 1984). Shaftesbury, Earl of (Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third). Second Characters, or The Language of Forms. Ed. Benjamin Rand (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1914). Signac, Paul. “D’Eugène Delacroix au néo-impressionisme.” La Revue blanche (Jun. 1898); reprint, Signac, D’Eugène Delacroix au néo-impressionisme. Ed. Françoise Cachin, 35–165 (Paris: Hermann, 1964). Silvestre, Théophile. Histoire des artistes vivants, français et étrangers (Paris: Blanchard, 1857). Stendhal. Histoire de la peinture en Italie (Paris: Didot, 1817); reprint, ed. Victor Del Litto (Paris: Gallimard, 1996). ——. Racine et Shakspeare I, II (Paris: Michel Lévy, 1854). ——. Souvenirs d’égotisme. Ed. Henri Martineau (Paris: Le Divan, 1927). ——. Vie de Henry Brulard (Paris: Emile-Paul, 1890); reprint, ed. Henri Martineau (Paris: Le Divan, 1949). Tacitus, Cornelius Publius. Annals. Trans. Alfred John Church and William Jackson Brodribb (New York: Modern Library, 1942). Tasso, Torquato. Jerusalem Delivered. Trans. Edward Fairfax, ed. and with an introduction by John Charles Nelson (New York: Capricorn Books, 1963). Vigny, Alfred de. Oeuvres complètes. 2 vols. Eds. François Germain, André Jarry, and Alphonse Bouvet (Paris: Gallimard, 1986).

2 Secondary Source Material A. Catalogs of Delacroix’s Works Delteil, Loÿs. Delacroix, the Graphic Work: A Raisonné. Trans. and rev. by Susan Strauber (San Francisco: Alan Wofsy Fine Arts, 1997). Johnson, Lee. The Paintings of Eugène Delacroix: A Critical Catalogue. 6 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981). Robaut, Alfred. L’Oeuvre complet de Eugène Delacroix, peintures, dessins, lithographes (Paris: Charavay, 1885). Sérullaz, Maurice. Inventaire général des dessins école française: dessins d’Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863). 2 vols. (Paris: Editions de la Réunion des Musées Nationaux, 1984).

B. Exhibition Catalogs Guilbaut, Serge, Maureen Ryan, et al. Théodore Géricault. The Alien Body: Tradition in Chaos. Vancouver: Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, University of British Columbia, 15 Aug.–19 Oct. 1997.

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Forestier, Sylvie, Arlette Sérullaz, et al. Delacroix: peintures et dessins d’inspiration religieuse. Nice: Musée National Message Biblique Marc Chagall, 5 Jul.–6 Oct. 1986. Jobert, Barthélémy, Sylvie Aubenas, et al. Delacroix, le trait romantique. Paris: Bibliothèque Nationale de France, 6 Apr.–12 Jul. 1998. Johnson, Lee, et al. Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863): Paintings, Drawings, and Prints from North American Collections. New York: Metropolitan Museum, 10 Apr.–16 Jun. 1991. Ojalvo, David, Françoise Demange, et al. Léon Cogniet (1794–1880). Orléans: Musée des Beaux-Arts, 14 Jun. 1994–10 Sep. 1995. Penent, Jean, and Geneviève Salvador. Eugène Delacroix: ses collaborateurs et ses élèves toulousains. Toulouse: Musée Paul Dupuy, 31 Oct. 1991–30 Jan. 1992. Pétry, Claude, Lee Johnson, et al. Delacroix: la naissance d’un nouveau romantisme. Rouen: Musée des Beaux-Arts, 4 Apr.–15 Jul. 1998. Rosenblum, Robert, Jacques Foucart, et al. French Painting 1774–1830: The Age of Revolution. Paris: Grand Palais, 16 Nov. 1974–3 Feb. 1975; Detroit: Institute of Arts, 5 Mar.–4 May 1975; New York: Metropolitan Museum, 12 Jun.–7 Sep. 1975. Sérullaz, Arlette, Vincent Pomarède, et al. Delacroix. The Late Work. Paris: Galeries Nationales du Grand Palais, 7 Apr.–20 Jul. 1998; Philadelphia: Museum of Art, 15 Sep. 1998–3 Jan. 1999. Szeemann, Harald, Lee Johnson, et al. Eugène Delacroix. Zürich: Kunsthaus, 5 Jun.–23 Aug. 1987; Frankfurt: Städtische Galerie im Städelschen Kunstinstitut Frankfurt am Main, 24 Sep. 1987–10 Jan. 1988. Torres Guardiola, Pascal et al. Delacroix à Versailles: Autour de la Bataille de Taillebourg. Versailles: Musée National des Châteaux de Versailles et de Trianon, 16 Nov. 1998–16 Feb. 1999. Sérullaz, Maurice, Arlette Sérullaz, et al. Delacroix: le voyage au Maroc. Paris: Institut du Monde Arabe, 27 Sep. 1994–15 Jan. 1995.

C. Secondary Literature Abrams, M.H. The Mirror and the Lamp (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1958). Aimé-Azam, Denise. Mazeppa, Géricault et son temps (Paris: Plon, 1956). Alauzen, André M. La Peinture en Provence du XIVe siècle à nos jours (Marseille: La Savoisienne, 1962). Athanassoglou-Kallmyer, Nina M. “French Images from the Greek War of Independence, 1821–1827: Art and Politics under the Restoration.” Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 1980. ——. “Of Suliots, Arnauts, Albanians and Eugène Delacroix.” Burlington Magazine 125 (Aug. 1983): 487–490. ——. French Images from the Greek War of Independence, 1821–1830 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989). ——. Eugène Delacroix: Prints, Politics and Satire 1814–1822 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991). ——. “Eugène Delacroix and Popular Culture.” In The Cambridge Companion to Delacroix. Ed. Beth S. Wright, 48–68 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). Attwater, Donald. The Penguin Dictionary of Saints (London: Penguin Books, 1983). Bann, Stephen. Paul Delaroche: History Painted (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997).

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Honour, Hugh. Neoclassicism (Harmondsworth, 1972). ——. Romanticism (London, 1979). Jobert, Barthélémy. Delacroix. Trans. Terry Grabar and Alexandra Bonfante-Warren (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000). Johnson, Lee. “Mazeppa in Giza: a Riddle Solved.” Burlington Magazine 125 (Aug. 1983): 491–4. Lajer-Burcharth, Ewa. “David’s Sabine Woman: Body, Gender and Republican Culture under the Directory.” Art History 14 (Sep. 1991): 397–430. Larue, Anne. “Delacroix and his Critics: Stakes and Strategies.” In Art Criticism and Its Institutions in Nineteenth-Century France. Ed. Michael R. Orwicz, 63–87 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994). ——. “Delacroix et ses élèves d’après un manuscrit inédit.” Romantisme 93 (1996): 7–20. MacClintock, Lucy. “Romantic actualité: Contemporaneity and Execution in the Work of Delacroix, Vernet, Scheffer, and Sigalon.” Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1993. McKee, George D. “Charles-Paul Landon’s Advocacy of Modern French Art, 1800–1825: The Annales du Musée.” In Album Amicorum Kenneth C. Lindsay: Essays on Art and Literature. Eds. Susan Alyson Stein and George D. McKee, 203–33 (Binghamton: State University of New York Press, 1990). Mainardi, Patricia. “Mazeppa.” Word and Image 16 (Oct–Dec. 2000): 335–51. Majewski, Henry F. Paradigm and Parody: Images of Creativity in French Romanticism, Vigny, Hugo, Balzac, Gautier, Musset (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1989). Marrinan, Michael. Painting Politics for Louis-Philippe: Art and Ideology in Orléanist France, 1830–1848 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987). Millet, Claude, ed. L’esthétique romantique en France (Paris: Agora, 1994). Mras, George. Eugène Delacroix’s Theory of Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966). Pavel, Thomas G. “Racine and Stendhal.” Yale French Studies 76 (1989): 265–83. Pitman, Dianne W. Bazille: Purity, Pose, and Painting in the 1860s (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998). Pomarède, Vincent. Eugène Delacroix: La Mort de Sardanapale (Paris: Service Culturel du Musée du Louvre, 1998). Potts, Alex. Flesh and the Ideal: Winckelmann and the Origins of Art History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994). Racine, Jean. Britannicus (Lausanne: F. Rouge, 1945). Reichler, Claude. “Talma en Néron dans Britannicus.” Saggi e ricerche di letteratura francese 29 (1990): 167–87. Rosen, Charles, and Henri Zerner. Romanticism and Realism: The Mythology of Nineteenth-Century Art (New York: Viking, 1984). Rosenthal, Léon. La Peinture romantique (Paris: H. Laurens, 1914). Rubin, James. “Pygmalion and Galatea: Girodet and Rousseau.” Burlington Magazine 127 (Aug. 1985): 517–20. ——. “Delacroix’s Barque as a Romantic Manifesto: Politics and Theory in the Early 1820s.” Art Journal

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Photo credits Figs 1–13, 15 except Christ in the Garden of Olives, 16–26, 28–30, 31, 34, 36–52, 54, 56, 57, 60–64: Art Resource, NYC Fig. 14: Museu de Arte de São Paulo Figs 15, 27, 34: Mairie de Paris Figs 31, 35: Musées d’Art et d’Histoire, La Rochelle Figs 32, 33: Musée Crozatier, Le Puy-en-Velay Figs 53, 55, 58, 59: Musée des Beaux-Arts, Nîmes Fig. 65: Ateneum Art Museum, Finnish National Gallery, Helsinki

Index Works by Delacroix are listed under their titles.

Abel de Pujol, Alexandre, 41, 49, 51, 55–56, 60, 65, 93 académie, 40, 42, 56 affect, see suffering Aimé-Azam, Denise, 170n.15 Anderson, Wilda, xii, 108–9, 165n.18, 165n.20–21, 166n.22 Arasse, Daniel, 46, 157n.32 Aristotle, 59, 159n.54, 158n.56 Armstrong, Carol, 84, 161n.29 Athanassoglou-Kallmyer, Nina, x, xii, 40, 42, 121, 155n.8, 156n.13, 160n.1 Aycard, Marie, and Frédéric Flocon, 69, 71–72, 77, 80 Bann, Stephen, xii, 14, 95, 98, 152n.20, 152n.24, 162n.10 Baschet, Robert, 155n.9 Baudelaire, Charles, xi, 3, 5, 12, 14, 20, 30, 32, 70, 121; choices of Delacroix’s paintings, 16–17; History of Painting in Italy, 32, 101, 154n.56 Bedouin, 158n.52 Bellori, Giovanni Pietro, 154n.56 Benjamin, Walter, 15 Bérénice, 164n.4 Bergeron, Louis, 166n.28 blanc d’Espagne, 71 Bonheur, Rosa, 161n.33 Bonington, Richard Parkes, 84, 161n.28 Bordes, Philippe, 40–41, 53 Bouillo, Eva, 153n.52, 161n.31 Boulanger, Louis, 136, 138–39, 146–48, 169–70n.11 Britannicus, 91–92 brushwork, ix, 10–11, 14, 67–89; see also paint Burty, Philippe, 171n.33 Byron, George Gordon, 139, 141, 143, 170n.20 Caffort, Michael, 153n.48 Camp, Maxime Du, see Du Camp, Maxime Carracci, 154n.56, 167n.34 Chaudonneret, Marie-Claude, 37, 42, 152n.35, 155n.2, 155n.6, 156n.13 Champfleury, Jules, 5 Chauvin, Auguste, 42, 54–57, 64, 93, 95 Chios, Scenes from the Massacres at, see Scenes from the Massacres at Chios Chios, town of, 42–43 Christ in the Garden of Olives, viii, 16, 27 Clark, T.J., 89, 161n.34, 162n.4

Clay, Jean, 164n.1 Cogniet, Léon, viii, xi, 21, 25, 27, 33, 95 color, 14, 25, 43, 54, 75, 85, 146, 151n.2, 161n.27; as defining of Delacroix, ix, 1, 67, 69; close reading of, 70; in Neo–Impressionism, 10–12 Condillac, Étienne Bonnot de, 108–9, 165n.18, 165n.21 Constable, John, 84, 161n.28 Courbet, Gustave, xi, 1, 120 Crary, Jonathan, viii, 14–15, 84 Cropper, Elizabeth, 58, 158n.53 Crow, Thomas, viii, 2, 14, 21, 37, 135–36, 151n.2, 155n.1, 155n.3, 169n.4, 169nn.8–10 Crusaders Entering Constantinople, 12, 16, 31; Baudelaire’s comments on, 20 Dante and Virgil in Hell, viii, 1, 14, 16 David, Jacques-Louis, viii–x, 38, 40, 51, 53–55, 59–60, 114–15. See also Davidian tradition Davidian tradition, ix, 38, 40–41, 47, 65, 93, 101, 135, 151n.2, 162n.7, 163n.21; dislike for, 156n.20 Death of Sardanapalus, 1, 16, 71, 84, 148, 161n.26; horse in, 87 Debord, Guy, 15 Delacroix, Ferdinand-Victor-Eugène, dispersed, synchronic assessments of, 14–15; exemplary works, xi, 1, 3, 16, 121; facility with paint, 10–12; Journal, 3, 21, 23, 152n.38; Géricault and, 135–49; trip to Morocco, 1; unevenness in the scholarship on, 1. See also under titles of individual paintings Delaroche, Paul, 94–95, 98, 152n.20, 162n.3, 162nn.9–10 delay, effect of, 85, 88–89, 145–49 Delécluze, Étienne-Jean, viii–ix, 37–65, 76, 97, 163n.19; The Mechanical King, 42, 52, 61, 64, 123–33 Dempsey, Charles, 154n.56, 158n.50, 158n.55 de Vigny, Alfred, see Vigny, Alfred de Diable boiteux, le, 77 Diana and Actaeon, 15, 33 Diderot, Denis, 105–14, 165n.17; reception of, 166n.24 Drolling, Michel–Martin, 41, 46–47, 52, 63, 93, 157n.29 Du Camp, Maxime, 84, 89, 161n.26 Duflo, Colas, 166n.24 Egypt, Napoleonic campaign in, 58 Eisenman, Stephen, 152n.20 Eitner, Lorenz, 170n.18, 170n.22 Euripides, 157n.29

facture, see brushwork Fantin-Latour, Henri, viii, 3, 5, 8, 151n.6 Flocon, Frédéric, see Aycard, Marie, and Frédéric Flocon Forbin, Auguste de, 37 Forestier, Sylvie, 153n.39 Foster, Hal, 21 Fowler, James, 166n.24 Fraser, Elisabeth, 37, 42, 80, 82, 155n.2, 158n.48, 160n.23 Fried, Michael, xii, 3, 33, 40, 84, 105, 110, 155–56n.11, 163n.20, 169n.7, 171n.33; generation of 1864, 5, 8, 10; idea of “memory structure,” 17, 20–21, 23; see also tableau Gatty, Fiona, 164n.1 Gautier, Théophile, 152n.10 gender, xi, 153n.51 genres of painting, 5, 84 110, 119, 165n.14; hierarchy of, 151n.7; see also history painting Géricault, Théodore, ix, xi, 2, 77, 119, 135–49; Charging Chasseur, 136; Raft of the Medusa, 21, 25, 30 Germanicus, 49 Girard, René, 108, 165n.19 Girodet-Trioson, Anne-Louis, 57–58, 69, 71, 73 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 166n.26 Golder, John, 164n.7 Gotlieb, Marc, xii, 21, 121, 152n.36, 162n.3, 169n.3 Grate, Pontus, 152n.21 Greek War of Independence, ix, 38, 42, 155n.8 Greenberg, Clement, viii, 3, 15–16 Greuze, Jean-Baptiste, 110 grief, see suffering Grimaldo Grigsby, Darcy, x–xii, 42, 72, 75, 82, 121, 158n.52, 160n.1, 160n.17 Grimm, Jacob, 103, 117 Gros, Jean-Antoine, 14 Grunchec, Philippe, 135, 169n.3 Hamlet, 16 Hannoosh, Michèle, x, xii, 3 Hecuba, 46–47 Hermione, 104–5, 112, 117 history painting, 41, 51, 54, 56, 59–60, 120–21, 156n.12; 165n.14, 170n.18; see also genres of painting Honour, Hugh, 153n.51 horses, 77, 135–49, 160n.14; see also Death of Sardanapalus, horse in; Scenes from the Massacres at Chios, horse in Hugo, Victor, 171n.32 Hyde, Melissa, 153n.51 idéologues, 108 immobiles, les, 38, 155n.10 immobile figures, 43, 51, 61, 64 Ingres, Jean-Auguste-Dominique, viii, 1, 120, 168n.3 instantaneity, see temporal contraction

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Jal, Auguste, 84, 89, 153n.50 Jamot, Paul, 151n.1 Jobert, Barthélémy, xii, 82–83, 160–61n.24, 162n.2 Johnson, Dorothy, 156n.15 Johnson, Lee, 38, 135, 138, 141–42, 170n.13, 170–71n.24 Jonker, Marijke, 156n.12 Journal des débats, 38 July Revolution of 1830, 2 Justinian Composing His Laws, 161n.26 Kahng, Eik, xii, 121 Kerlouégan, François, 167n.38 Krauss, Rosalind, 84, 161n.29 Kulterman, Udo, 151n.6 lag, effect of, see delay, effect of Lajer-Burcharth, Ewa, 156n.12, 159n.56 Lambertson, John, 153n.52, 161n.31 Landon, Charles-Paul, ix, 77, 83, 157n.25 Laplace, Pierre-Simon, 165n.18 Lavoisier, Antoine, 165n.18, 166n.22 Legros, Alphonse, 5 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 103, 117 Liberty Leading the People, 1 MacClintock, Lucy, 162n.5 Mainardi, Patricia, 37, 139, 147, 155n.1, 155n.10, 169n.3, 170nn.14–15, 170n.20, 171n.27 Maine de Biran, François-Pierre-Gonthier, 113, 118, 166n.28 Mameluke, 158n.52 Manet, Édouard, 1, 5, 8, 120 Marrinan, Michael, 151n.3 Masaccio, 116 Mazeppa, 139–49 McKee, George, 157n.25 Mechanical King, The, see under Delécluze, Étienne-Jean Meissonier, Ernest, 162n.3 Medea, 16 migration, effect of, 85 moment, frozen, see temporal contraction multi-figure painting, 32, 51, 56–57, 77, 98; hierarchies in, 53 Nadar, Félix, 5 Neoclassicism, 37, 65, 153n.51 Neo-Impressionism, 10–11, 84–85 Nero, 92 nouvelle école, 91, 94, 95, 97, 115, 151n.2, 152n.21, 170n.17 Orestes, 104–5 Othello, 102 Paganini, 160n.1 paint, density of, 31, 71, 73 Painting, see brushwork; color; delay, effect of; genres of painting; history painting; paint; tableau; multi-figure painting Pavel, Thomas, 164n.6

performativity, see delay, effect of Pétry, Claude, 153n.39 Pillet, Fabien, 72, 77, 83, 156n.20 Polyxena, 46–47, 49, 64 porosity, effect of, 85, 145–48 Portrait of an Old Woman, 26–27, 153n.46 Potts, Alex, 59, 156n.15 Poussin, Nicolas, 57–58, 162n.4 Rabbe, Alphonse, 21, 152n.35, 160n.12 Racine, Jean, 91, 162n.5, 164n.4 Regnault, Henri, 162n.3 Reichler, Claude, 167n.36 Reni, Guido, 23, 154n.56 Restoration, 42, 65, 156n.12 Robert, Léopold, 157n.34 Rococo, 103 Romanticism, viii, 14, 65, 98, 156n.12 Rosenthal, Léon, viii, 14, 152n.20 Rubin, James, 156n.12

Thiers, Adolphe, 21, 69, 83, 95–96, 165n.16 time, see temporality Tracy, Destutt de, 108, 166n.28 Ubl, Ralph, x, 151n.13 Ulysses, 46 Vigny, Alfred de, 166–67n.31 Virgin of the Sacred Heart, 26–27, 153n.39 Vitet, Louis, 27, 30, 84, 161n.27 Ward, Martha, xii, 151n.9, 151n.15 Whistler, James McNeill, 5, 8 whiting, see blanc d’Espagne Wilkie, David, 84 Women of Algiers, 2, 11, 14, 16, 32–33, 84 Wright, Beth, 1, 151n.1, 156n.12 Wrigley, Richard, 156n.12 Young Girl in a Cemetery, 26, 152n.39

St. Sebastian, 16 Salon of 1824, viii, 1, 37–38, 41, 93 Santa Barbara, 120 Scenes from the Massacres at Chios, ix, 16, 119; Baudelaire’s comments on, 20–21; Chauvin on, 57–59, 61; dying mother in, 67–89; full title of, 37; horse in, 73–77, 87; old woman in, 12, 26, 31, 70; recumbent male in, 40, 42, 61, 63 Scheffer, Arnold, 163n.21 Schnetz, Jean-Victor, 47, 49, 63–64, 157n.34 School of David, see Davidian tradition Shaftesbury (Anthony Ashley-Cooper), 103, 117 Shipwreck of Don Juan, 11, 16, 85, 121 Siegfried, Susan, x, 120 Sigalon, Xavier, viii, x–xi, 91–98, 101, 104–7, 112–13, 116 Signac, Paul, viii, 3, 10–11, 14, 33, 67, 84–85 Silvestre, Théophile, 171n.33 simultaneity, 63 Solomon-Godeau, Abigail, 156n.15, 156–57n.24 Spector, Jack, 71, 84, 87, 151n.4, 160n.6, 161n.32 Spitzer, Alan, 156n.12 Stein, Susan Alyson, 157n.25 Stendhal (Henri Beyle), viii, x–xi, 69, 80, 93–94, 101–19; art criticism of, 101–18; on Cogniet, 33; on warfare, 166n.31 Stepanovyeh, Ivan, 139 Steuben, Charles, 163n.21 suffering, ix, 20, 30, 43, 57, 61, 58, 63, 83, 98, 104, 170n.15 tableau, viii–ix, 5, 8, 27 Tacitus, 49, 55, 157n.39 Talma, François-Joseph, 115 technique, see brushwork temporality, xi, 25, 112; contraction of, 91–93, 53, 95–97; distention of, 61, 146; order and disorder in, 110, 117–18; lags in, 116, 148; see also delay, effect of

Index

189