A canvas begun in the autumn of 1848 and finished
the following spring is, at four foot eight
inches wide, one of the heftier items in Delacroix
and the Rise of Modern Art, an exhibition
at the National Gallery in which paintings
by Eugène Delacroix mingle with others by
artists he influenced. In factual terms, Delacroix
presents us with a September evening in a
country garden, in which the last light lingers
on a basket piled deep with produce and on
the roses and hollyhocks overhead. The produce,
in all its lush diversity (gourds, peaches
and medlars, redcurrants and grapes), looks
to have been bought from a stall in Les Halles,
12 miles from Delacroix’s out-of-Paris getaway,
but without any thought of the dinner table.
In truth, questions of location and function
count for very little in A Basket of Fruit
in a Flower Garden. What does seem to matter,
though, is time, or forms of resistance to
it – the lingering, the lateness, the harvesting.
Much moved by this stately visual feast, I
struggle to name what feelings it induced.
‘Nostalgia’ comes quite near.
Facts mattered less to Delacroix than the
principle that a painting should form a ‘bridge’
from mind to mind. ‘I have told myself a
hundred times that painting – that is, the
material thing called a painting – is no
more than a pretext,’ he wrote in his journal
on 18 July 1850, ‘the bridge between the
mind of the painter and the mind of the spectator.’
What emotions, then, ran up to the bridge
from his side? Why did he make this big thing?
By way of a refusal to make yet bigger things,
according to his recent biographer Marie-Christine
Natta: she calls Delacroix’s still lifes
of 1848 the ‘secret protest’ of a politically
phlegmatic 50-year-old declining to match
Liberty Leading the People of 1830 with an
Equality on the Barricades fitted to that
year’s revolution, as the critic Théophile
Thoré had demanded. (Liberty and other furious
youthful bids for Salon glory are absent from
this exhibition, in which the paintings are
predominantly intimate in scale.)
Instead, Delacroix assembled, with middle-aged
deliberation, a compendium of specimens of
nature that is equally a compendium of pigments
and mediums. The switch from tomato to aubergine
becomes a switch from the fattest vermilion
to the gauziest suspension of violet-tinged
varnish. These colour forays bounce off against
one of easel painting’s structural problems,
as French tradition defined it – how to
unify, how to arrive at cohesive effect through
rhythms of highlights and darks. The canvas
should be analogous to greater ensembles:
as Roger de Piles wrote, establishing the
principle in 1708, ‘All the world’s entities
tend to unity … just as politics refers
everything to the government of a state.’
A centred composition might thus have statist
resonances, serving as a rebuke to ephemeral
calls to action; as so often with still life,
things in arrangement flip over into thoughts
in contemplation.
But on this side of the bridge, such stoic
wisdom could equally be read as autumnal wistfulness.
It is not that plants and botany specifically
interested Delacroix, in the way they interested
Jan de Heem and Jean-Baptiste Monnoyer, who
had painted the last flowerpieces of this
size back in the 17th century: it is rather
that the idea of being interested in such
things interested him. ‘Subject matter had
always been central to Delacroix’s art,’
the curator Christopher elle writes in the
exhibition catalogue. Yes – in that a yearning
for subject matter becomes in effect Delacroix’s
very own subject. The brooding that his Basket
of Fruit in a Flower Garden conveys is the
feeling with which you might try out someone
else’s old love song, wishing to be likewise
in love.
Delacroix tried out a great many old songs.
Two centuries previously, Rubens had created
a vision of the crucified Christ. What Delacroix
re-created in its wake, with his own Christ
on the Cross, was a vision of a Rubensian
ethos in painting, one in which physical sufferings
are instantly redeemed by their own rhythmic
visual attractiveness. The holy persons worshipped
in another nominally religious canvas, a Lamentation
which like the Basket of Fruit was meant for
the open market, were not Jesus and Mary but
Titian and Poussin. Whereas in his writings
Delacroix frowned on the mannerisms of Boucher,
he could launch into wholesale Rococo fantasia
in a canvas of Bathers in a woodland stream.
Curiosity, perhaps, on the part of the Louvre’s
most devoted student, who considered that
‘the force, the fecundity, and the universality’
of the great Renaissance artists put to shame
‘our miserable little pictures painted for
our miserable dwellings’. To be born in
1798 was to arrive very late: they ‘have
left but little for us to do’.
In light of this, to entitle a show Delacroix
and the Rise of Modern Art is to set yourself
an uphill struggle. Its protagonist was so
very chary about the present and the future.
Twenty-first-century London
has a language to learn, in order to settle
in with this imperious, consummately sophisticated
yet solitary man, who lived without partner
and almost without pupil and whose working
days were largely spent decorating palaces
and churches under Louis-Philippe and Napoleon
III. The exhibition offers a quick video tour
of these Paris murals, but this is inevitably
frustrating and I wish we had instead been
shown some working drawings.
These would have emphasised how much arduously
elaborated thought, close reading and research
underpinned Delacroix’s compositions. This
is not always obvious because afterwards Delacroix
would subordinate outlines to excited storms
of top-layer brushwork. A Goethe drama about
a Renaissance robber baron had long since
been absorbed into his repertory before he
painted the little canvas Weislingen Captured
by Goetz’s Men in 1853, as no doubt had
the wardrobe resources of the Comédie-Française.
To work out whose limb is whose in the scene’s
writhing knot of horses and riders might take
some time, but the concerted visual impact
of the fancy clothes, yellow, rose madder
and Prussian blue, is instantaneous. With
Delacroix, factual legibility yields to pictorial
unity, and contour to colour. But as I see
it, there was an interdependence any actor
would recognise. To whip up a passion, he
needed first to learn his lines.
Sheer visual impact was not, after all, the
sum of his objectives. If, as he hoped, Delacroix
still speaks mind to mind, it is partly because
his handiwork draws us into a web of excited
nervousness. The painter loftily ruminating
on culture in his journal became jittery about
his high ambitions as soon as he entered the
studio. And this hesitancy – his failure,
if you like, to be Rubens, his tendency to
deviate from clearly delivered content – offers
one viable basis for tracing Delacroix’s
modern legacy. His wilfully confected Bathers
take on new urgency when you hang next to
them Cézanne’s yet more dream-convulsed
Battle of Love, one defiant internal dialogue
reinvigorating another. Matisse, you might
argue, is a further case of heroic anxiety.
But exhibiting his hot urgent scrabbles, the
Japonaise of 1905 and the Red Carpet of 1906,
ties up an alternative account of how painters
interpreted Delacroix in the four decades
after his death. The consensus became that
deep, instantaneous communication through
force of colour was the directive for modern
art proposed by the master, but that they
might regard other aspects of him – the
love of literary references or the hard-pushed
draughtsmanship – as optional. There are
reasons here to exhibit Renoir canvases on
the one hand, Redon pastels on the other.
Gauguin and Van Gogh have roles to play too,
but Riopelle and his fellow curator Patrick
Noon also chase some distractingly tenuous
connections. Courbet, Monet and Signac don’t
sit well with an artistic forebear who kept
issues of observable fact so low on his agenda.
Why exhibit the banal Frédéric Bazille rather
than Adolphe Monticelli, who forms the missing
link between Eugène and Vincent? Fantin-Latour
may have been as studiously thoughtful as
Delacroix, but by the same token he needs
more space to explain himself than he’s
granted here – and press-ganging one of
his allegories into concluding the display
is like thrusting an understudy on stage to
deliver the encore.
But Riopelle and Noon do well to emblazon
on the walls Delacroix’s answer to his own
great conundrum. ‘Oh! Young artist, you
want a subject? Everything is a subject; the
subject is yourself.’ A thought he symbolised
in Christ on the Sea of Galilee, the exhibition’s
most visionary image: the saviour-artist asleep
in the storm-tossed boat amid its desperate
rowers, dreaming up both them and the storm,
himself their salvation. ‘You must look
within yourself and not around yourself,’
as his sermon to artists concludes. The tension
driving this obsessional picture-poem is the
anxiety plaguing a solipsist: if all must
be ‘me’, how shall ‘me’ be defined?
Must some wild sea yet lie beyond?
What is not ‘me’ can’t be known, Delacroix
declared in his journal on 30 April 1850,
baffled after watching trails and counter-trails
of ants moving along a woodland path: all
beings in the universe are forever ‘indecipherable
for one another’. And yet there might be
zones of half-knowledge, bridges for negotiation.
Typically Delacroix assigned them to North
Africa. Morocco and Algeria became part of
a personal imaginary after his 1832 visit,
which followed the French invasion of Algeria.
On the modest scale of this show, the operation
comes across less as political than as contemplative
and abstract. Ecstatic Sufis and frenetic
horsemen stand as junctures where the wild
becomes the cultural, giving civilisation
its necessary wellsprings of energy. The ‘living
antiquity’, as Delacroix put it, of their
grand gestures and noble robes becomes a space
where meaning might start to form.
Ovid in Exile among the Scythians, the National
Gallery’s major late Delacroix, has never
looked so good as here, set beside the Moroccan
scenes. Translating the theme of the self
and of the wilds that surround it to muted
northern skies, the painter’s empathy expands.
How touchingly makeshift, the low knoll in
the bleak Thracian wastes that has become
the poet’s sole preserve. How humane, the
barbarian who has come to bring him mare’s
milk.
