Painting and the Journal of Eugene Delacroix

About this book

The Journal of Eugne Delacroix is one of the most important works in the literature of art history: the record of a life at once public and private it is also one of the richest and most fascinating aesthetic documents of the nineteenth century as Delacroix reflects throughout on the relations between the arts especially painting and writing. Indeed he approaches the question from a unique perspective that of a painter who wrote extensively and theorized his own writing in the Journal a painter who had a passion for literature and a powerful literary imagination a narrative painter whose work is rooted in literature and the literary. This book is the first to explore the crucial importance of this relation for Delacroixs aesthetic theory and artistic practice. Countering the long critical tradition which sees his writing as the inverse of his painting it argues that through his diary and art criticism he sought to develop a painters writing proper to painting itself and that such a writing is closely related to his conception of pictorial art. This approach has significant implications for interpreting the narratives of his public decorations four of which are analyzed here: the library schemes of the Senate and the Assemble Nationale the Apollo Gallery in the Louvre and the Chapel of the Holy Angels at the church of Saint-Sulpice. Delacroixs ideas on the theoretical and practical relations between writing and painting narrative and the image are shown to be central not only to his aesthetic but also to his views on civilization history and culture and on the role of the artist in the modern world.