Word: delacroix
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...biggest was in the main galleries of the Louvre, where 165 of his oils, including many borrowed from distant museums, are on show. They go to prove what a close friend of Delacroix said about him shortly after his death...
Wild and exotic music came from that keyboard: scenes of massacre and battle and hell. There were (see color) the funereal chords of his Hamlets, the lyric melancholy of some of his portraits, the emotional rhythms of his still lifes. History has cast Delacroix in the role of the great romanticist pitted against Ingres, France's great classicist. Yet for all his passion, he was a man of intellect who never surrendered to unbridled emotion. "Reason must control all our infirmities," he said...
...Exigent Mistress." Eugène Delacroix burst upon Paris at the age of 24 when he exhibited in the Salon his tortured scene of hell, Dante and Virgil. The painting was viciously attacked by some of the critics, but the government of France bought it all the same-a purchase so out of character for bureaucratic establishments as to inspire a generally accepted conjecture that Delacroix was the illegitimate son of Talleyrand, the French foreign minister...
...famous Journal, Delacroix records a number of love affairs, but the only one that lasted was with his "exigent mistress," painting. Wherever he looked-into an overcast sky, at a news item about a Turkish massacre, into the fragile face of his friend Chopin, or even into his own mirror-he saw things that addressed themselves "to the most intimate part of the soul." He was an expert draftsman who told his students, "If you are not clever enough to do a sketch of a man throwing himself out of a window during the time it takes him to fall...
...found the glories of Greece and Rome not in the marble masterpieces of museums but in the antique civilization of Morocco, where man seemed to him to be so many "Catos and Brutuses." Whereas in other artists a love of antiquity resulted in a cool neoclassicism, it became in Delacroix a lush and dazzling orientalism. Similarly-though Delacroix's French conscience hated to admit it-he found nothing to move him in the measured verses of Racine but a whole world of inspiration in the hot-blooded visions of Shakespeare...