What most later artists admired about the work of Eugène Delacroix
was its colour.
Cezanne said he had the most beautiful palette in France.
But what was it that they were so excited about?
Perhaps the single most important thing about Delacroix's work
is that it treats everything as if it were coloured.
So he doesn't just consider objects in the light
as having colour
but also shadows and so-called half-tones,
the areas between light and shade.
To understand his ideas about colour
we need to consider the notion of primary and secondary colours,
and complementaries.
What these terms mean is best understood
by looking at this colour circle
from a book by Léonor Mérimée of 1830
which Delacroix probably knew.
This shows us that opposite
the three painter's primary colours,
namely red, blue and yellow,
lie the three mixed or secondary colours,
purple, green and orange.
For Delacroix then, colours formed complementary pairs,
meaning that they enhanced each other when placed side by side.
In this version he made of his own painting
'The Death of Sardanapalus'
we can see how Delacroix has used
complementary pairs to produce rich contrast.
But it's important to realise that Delacroix
is not always consistent.
In the naked torsos
Delacroix seems to have introduced the secondary colours,
orange, purple, and to a lesser extent, green
into the flesh colours, to give them variety.
It is as if these secondary colours were
reflections of some kind.
Delacroix's way of using colour was undoubtedly idiosyncratic
and complicated
but its great advantage and its lasting impact on later artists
is that it allowed him to link colours together.
And in this painting 'Moroccan mounting his Horse'
Delacroix brings together complementary colours
and closely related colours too
whilst blending them together
using tiny flecks of paint
in a technique he called 'flochetage'.
It's particularly this aspect of Delacroix's work,
continually weaving colours together across the whole canvas,
that so excited later painters
and Cézanne particularly.
