Delacroix's Chios Analysis

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 works by artist who are now obscure – Xavier Sigalon, Leon 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 Etienne-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 kind of work he did in the 1820s and beyond were shaped by the setting of the 1824 Salon, along …show more content…
The Chios ostensibly depicts an episodic aftermath of violent events from the Greek War of Independence (1821-7), but its slumped figure 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 writing overall provide vital support for my analysis. For example, I take a look at an intriguing novella he wrote (it has 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