Ferdinand Victor Eugц?ne DELACROIX

(1798-1863)
He was born in Charenton-Saint-Maurice, near Paris, April 26, 1798. To his painting is characterized by the choice of heroic stories (eg, painting Liberty on the barricades: July 28, 1830).
Romantic art of Delacroix represents the opposite of painting by Jacques-Louis David and his followers, one of whom, Pierre Narcisse Guerin, Delacroix was a teacher. His first big job, Dante and Virgil, and exhibited at the Salon of 1822, Guerin was struck by the harshness of the thick gloom and shadows, and one of the conservative critics called the painting Massacre of Chios, exhibited in 1824, the massacre of painting. However, both pictures were met with delight by opponents of the school of David, and critics of the wrangle only strengthened the glory of Delacroix.

The artist was a great connoisseur of art of the British landscape: Dzh.Konstebla, Dzh.Ternera and R. Bonington. Following the example of Theodore Gericault, in 1825 he went to London to study paintings by these masters. When in 1824 a picture by Constable wagon for hay was presented at the preview before the opening of the Paris Salon, she has made on Delacroix was so impressed that he would one day rewrote the background of his picture on the massacre of Chios. A few portraits painted by Delacroix in the same years, different shades of transparency and elegance, reminiscent of Gainsborough.

Passion for French artists exotic oriental stories, which arose under the influence of the Egyptian campaign of Napoleon, and then resumed during the Greek War of Independence, was also reflected in the works of Delacroix. Many of the subjects of his paintings were borrowed from the poetry of Byron, including the death of Sardanapalus (1827, Louvre) and Greece on the ruins of Missolungi (1826, Bordeaux, Museum of Fine Arts). Other reasons connected with the works of W. Scott, for example Abduction of Rebecca and the capture of Constantinople by the Crusaders (1840-1841, Louvre). In 1832 the artist traveled to Morocco. On arrival on the basis made during that visit the outline and the diary he wrote a picture of Algerian women (1833-1834) and Jewish wedding in Morocco (1839, both - in the Louvre). Delacroix never stopped research into the problems colors both in theory and in practice, and laid the foundations of Impressionist painting. Delacroix died in Paris on August 13, 1863.

The paintings, the artist in the Bourbon (1833-1847) and the Luxembourg Palace (1845-1847), as well as in the Church of Saint Sulpice (1849-1861) in Paris, are among the most famous of his works. Most of the Delacroix paintings are in the Louvre.