Drawing and the Formation of an Artist
Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863) received a conventional academic training in drawing, although his subsequent practice would extend far beyond its prescribed methods. He began formal instruction at the Lycée Impérial, later Louis-le-Grand, in Paris, where he won distinctions for drawing in 1813 and 1814. In 1815, at the age of seventeen, he entered the studio of Pierre-Narcisse Guérin, and the following year he was admitted to the École des Beaux-Arts. Guérin’s teaching reflected Neoclassical principles, particularly the importance of ideal beauty and the authority of contour, but he encouraged his pupils to develop their individual abilities rather than simply reproduce his own manner.
Delacroix’s early training involved the customary study of the nude, anatomy, antique sculpture and plaster casts. An academic drawing of a male model holding a staff, discussed by Ashley E. Dunn, preserves two attempts at the same pose. On the recto, the figure is carefully modelled in charcoal with white chalk highlights. On the verso, a less finished study records the model from another viewpoint, with difficulties of foreshortening that appear to have prompted the young artist to change his position.
Such exercises established habits of observation and correction that remained important long after his formal education. Delacroix continued to study anatomy and draw from antique sculpture throughout his career, sometimes without any particular project in mind.
Copying was equally fundamental. Delacroix registered with the Cabinet des Estampes at the Bibliothèque nationale in 1816 and remained an assiduous student of reproductive prints. He found the repetitive copying exercises prescribed in Guérin’s studio tedious, but not because he objected to copying itself. On the contrary, he regarded the study of earlier artists as indispensable to the development of an individual style. In his review of Élisabeth Cavé’s Le Dessin sans maître, he defended copying as a means of training the eye and as a source of pleasure, allowing the artist to study the achievements of others without the anxieties associated with invention. In his Journal, he expressed the relationship between preparation and execution succinctly: “Before you begin, study unceasingly, but once started you must execute freely.”
Raphael occupied an important place among the artists Delacroix studied. He admired the Renaissance master’s drawing, grace and compositional organisation, and considered him an exemplary student of earlier art. A pen-and-ink copy of a Combat of Nude Men, made around 1823, reproduces a composition known to Delacroix through an etching by Thomas Vivares after a drawing by Raphael. Dunn notes the care with which Delacroix followed the arrangement of the figures, including the relationships between their bodies. Yet faithful copying of entire compositions was only one aspect of his practice. A sheet of studies after Raphael’s Vatican Loggia brings together figures taken from four separate frescoes. Their original narrative contexts have been set aside in favour of particular attitudes and gestures. The earlier works provided material for close examination, but Delacroix was free to select whatever interested him.
His admiration for Rubens was still more enduring. Rubens appears in Delacroix’s Journal more frequently than any other artist, and his paintings prompted journeys to Belgium in 1839 and 1850. Nevertheless, most of Delacroix’s drawings after Rubens were made from reproductive prints. As Maurice Sérullaz and Dunn demonstrate, copying allowed him to study compositions that were geographically inaccessible, but also to isolate and rearrange particular elements. In a drawing after Rubens’s Adoration of the Magi, Delacroix concentrated upon the heads of the three kings, indicating the Holy Family only summarily. Elsewhere he combined figures derived from different Rubens compositions on a single sheet. The act of copying could thus become a means of exploring relationships not present in the original painting.
An especially revealing connection was established through Théodore Géricault, whom Delacroix encountered in Guérin’s studio. The two artists developed a friendship, and Delacroix posed for a figure in Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa (1818–19). A sheet in the Karen B. Cohen Collection, discussed by Dunn, contains Delacroix’s copy of a preparatory study associated with that painting. The figure resembles the one for which Delacroix himself had posed, raising the possibility that he was copying a drawing made from his own body. On the reverse of the sheet are studies of falling figures derived from Rubens’s Fall of the Damned, a composition that Géricault had also examined while preparing The Raft of the Medusa. Delacroix may have consulted the reproductive engraving directly, but the simplified treatment of the figures also recalls Géricault’s studies. The drawing preserves the intersection of two artistic relationships, with Rubens’s example mediated in part through the work of a contemporary painter.
English art also contributed to his education. Richard Parkes Bonington and John Constable offered alternatives to the conventions of French academic painting, particularly in their handling of landscape, atmosphere and colour. Delacroix’s engagement with English artists extended to graphic art, including the linear compositions of John Flaxman and the satirical drawings of Thomas Rowlandson. He investigated Flaxman’s illustrations through tracing, despite subsequently rejecting the austerity of their Neoclassical outline. His acquaintance with English caricature, meanwhile, helped inform his own early satirical drawings.
Delacroix’s relationship with Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres was more contentious. Their disagreement concerned not only artistic reputation but competing conceptions of drawing itself. Ingres’s insistence upon the authority of line and academic discipline stood against aspects of Delacroix’s practice, although the opposition between the two artists was more complicated than a simple contrast between drawing and colour. Ingres reportedly declared at a dinner in 1855, “Monsieur! le dessin c’est la probité; monsieur! le dessin c’est l’honneur.” Delacroix’s criticisms of Ingres were equally severe.
Drawing from Life
Direct observation remained central to Delacroix’s practice throughout his life. However freely he might subsequently transform a subject, he believed that nature provided effects and relationships that invention alone could not supply. In his Journal, he warned that even a promising artistic conception could be impoverished if the painter neglected the study of nature, with its unexpected forms and particularities. His drawings of animals, people, trees and landscapes reveal a delight in observation for its own sake.
Animals held a particular fascination. Delacroix regularly visited the menagerie at the Jardin des Plantes in Paris, sometimes accompanied by the sculptor Antoine-Louis Barye, whose own work demonstrated a close knowledge of animal anatomy. Lions and tigers were favourite subjects, but Delacroix also studied horses, goats and other creatures, recording their postures and characteristic movements with varying degrees of precision. His notebooks and loose sheets contain repeated studies of the same animals, sometimes accompanied by observations about their colouring and physical characteristics. In a graphite drawing of lions dated 30 August 1841, for instance, he noted the brownish tint of a mane and the lighter yellow colouring near the animal’s nose. Even where the medium itself supplied no colour, written annotations could preserve what he had seen.
The attraction of the menagerie was not exclusively artistic. Delacroix’s Journal describes the happiness he experienced upon entering the Jardin des Plantes and the relief it brought from the cares of ordinary life. The animals absorbed his attention and awakened his curiosity, allowing him to escape habitual preoccupations. So restorative was the experience that even the trees seemed newly interesting when he left. Such reflections give a personal dimension to the numerous drawings he made during these visits. The activity of observation offered pleasure in itself, independent of anything that might subsequently be produced from the studies.
The character of the drawings varied considerably. In Ten Studies of Goats, a sheet discussed by Dunn, Delacroix used short, swelling strokes and horizontal hatching to record the animals’ forms. The repetition of these marks gives the drawing an almost meditative character, with the movement of the pen becoming part of the pleasure of observation. Crouching Tiger (1839), now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, displays a more concentrated energy. Executed in pen and brush, the drawing records the animal gathering itself before a spring. Dunn identifies the curved back, folded hindquarters and movement of the tail around the leg as essential to its expression of contained force. The graphic means are economical, yet the animal’s physical tension is firmly established.
Movement presented a persistent challenge, particularly in the study of horses. Delacroix examined animals at rest and in action, accumulating knowledge of their anatomy and the changing relationships of their limbs. Some sheets bring together successive postures or alternative studies of an encounter between animals. In Studies of a Rearing Horse Attacked by a Lion and a Lion Wrestling with a Serpent, the subject is physical conflict, with the bodies caught in moments of violent movement. Such drawings reflect an interest in the expressive possibilities of animal behaviour that extended into his paintings of hunts and combats. Other studies remained independent observations, without any established connection to a finished composition.
Delacroix’s engagement with nature also flourished during his frequent departures from Paris. At Valmont in Normandy, where his cousin owned a former Benedictine abbey, he filled a sketchbook during a visit in 1829 with drawings of the buildings, gardens and neighbouring countryside. The subjects included the coast at Fécamp and the Château de Tancarville. Several years later, Champrosay, near the forest of Sénart, became a favoured retreat. Delacroix first visited in 1844, eventually purchasing a house there in 1858. His Journal records walks through the surrounding countryside and close attention to the appearance of trees. A graphite study entitled Fir Tree captures the drooping branches and bristling needles through a limited number of strokes, while his written observations show a comparable interest in the distinguishing characteristics of individual forms.
An earlier excursion to Tours in 1828 provides particularly revealing evidence of his landscape practice. As Jacques Olivier Bouffier demonstrates in the study of the Tours sketchbook, Delacroix took advantage of his temporary escape from Paris to explore the surrounding countryside with pencil and paper. The surviving drawings range from abbreviated sketches and colour notations to carefully constructed views in perspective. Ravines, river valleys, buildings and wooded slopes attracted his attention, and the sketchbook preserves considerable differences in handling according to the demands of each subject.
A drawing of a ravine near Saint-Avertin, on folio 12r, records the contours of the terrain together with indications of vineyards and abbreviated colour notes. Bouffier identifies the site as characteristic of the small valleys running towards the River Cher. Delacroix used variations in the pressure of his graphite to distinguish darker and lighter passages, while the annotations specified features that could not be conveyed through monochrome drawing alone. The sheet belongs to a series of landscape observations that he subsequently revisited in watercolour.
The relationship between observation and artistic freedom was one Delacroix continued to consider. Bouffier cites his remark, “Il y a les licences pittoresques comme les licences poétiques”, recognising a freedom in pictorial representation comparable to that permitted in poetry. The landscapes of the Tours sketchbook show how closely that freedom depended upon an attentive encounter with actual places. The initial drawings preserve topographical information, variations of light and the particular character of the terrain, while leaving open the possibility of a different pictorial treatment.
In his later observations of nature, Delacroix became increasingly attentive to the effects of atmosphere and changing light. He studied reflections on water, contrasts of illumination and the colours of the evening sky, sometimes recording his impressions in writing as well as drawing. These interests drew him towards watercolour and pastel, media that could register chromatic relationships beyond the resources of graphite or ink. His observations in the countryside thus opened onto a sustained investigation of colour, while the drawings retained their immediate connection with the experience of looking.
A watercolour of The Sea at Dieppe, made during the 1850s, records the changing colours of the English Channel. Delacroix accompanied his observations of sunlight reflected upon the waves with written notes on the colours of the sea and distant horizon.
Travel and the Encounter with the World
In January 1832, Delacroix arrived in Morocco as a member of the diplomatic mission led by Charles de Mornay to the court of Sultan Abd er-Rahman. The mission sought Moroccan cooperation following the French invasion of Algeria in 1830, particularly in preventing support for resistance to the occupation. Delacroix, who had joined the expedition at relatively short notice, spent the following six months travelling through Morocco, southern Spain and Algeria. The experience altered his artistic outlook and provided material to which he would return throughout his life.
His first impressions were overwhelming. Writing from Tangier to his friend Jean-Baptiste Pierret on 25 January, he described the excitement of his arrival and his difficulty in recording everything he encountered. He felt, he wrote, like a man dreaming, afraid that what he saw would escape him. The comparison conveys the urgency with which he began to draw. Almost immediately, he found himself surrounded by subjects that demanded attention: people in unfamiliar dress, the movements of horses, architectural ornament, markets, streets and the changing effects of sunlight.
Delacroix had brought pencils, brushes, watercolours and portable notebooks, which he employed throughout the expedition. The resulting drawings vary from abbreviated graphic notations to carefully observed studies, often combining images with written descriptions. Seven notebooks and sketchbooks associated with the journey were dispersed after his death, although substantial portions survive. The discovery in 2018 of two previously inaccessible sketchbooks has considerably expanded our knowledge of his working methods. In her study of these materials, Michèle Hannoosh demonstrates the complex relationships between observations recorded in different notebooks and the continuing process of repetition and revision through which Delacroix organised his experiences.
The sketchbooks accompanied him through very different circumstances. He spent several weeks in Tangier before travelling inland to Meknes for the official audience with the sultan, returning afterwards to the coast. Later excursions took him to Cádiz and Seville, followed by brief stays in Oran and Algiers. Drawing was not always easy. Political restrictions limited his movements, and his activities sometimes attracted hostile attention. Yet he worked whenever opportunities arose, recording figures at rest, riders and their horses, architectural details and incidents encountered during the journey.
Architecture and ornament occupied an important place among these observations. In Tangier, Delacroix examined the pasha’s residence, recording its entrance, courtyard, guardhouse and façade. Hannoosh identifies corresponding passages in the recently rediscovered Aubry sketchbook and the Tangier notebook. In the former, brief written headings are accompanied by watercolour sketches; in the latter, the same subjects appear in a more extended written account, together with a schematic plan. The relationship between the two records suggests that Delacroix returned to his observations, transferring and elaborating information rather than treating each notebook as a self-contained account.
Elsewhere he examined doors, shutters and architectural decoration with comparable attention. A watercolour study of interior doors in the Aubry sketchbook records their construction and ornamental arrangement, accompanied by annotations concerning colour. Hannoosh connects such studies with his continuing interest in Islamic architecture, which he admired for the variety and originality of its forms. In a later reflection, he described the architecture he had encountered as possessing an exquisite elegance. The surviving drawings preserve something of the attentive curiosity behind that judgement, extending beyond the general appearance of buildings to the particular arrangement of their architectural elements.
Costume presented another absorbing subject. Delacroix repeatedly studied the forms of garments, their materials, colours and methods of arrangement. In the drawings examined by Agnes Mongan, annotations identify wool, silk and veils, together with details of sandals, belts, turbans and other accessories. Individual sheets combine several figures in different positions, sometimes concentrating upon a particular garment or posture. A drawing dated 6 April 1832, made near the River Sebou, includes travellers on horseback, details of stirrups and notes concerning the colours of their clothing. Delacroix also recorded the arrival of letters from France on the same sheet, preserving an incidental circumstance alongside his visual observations.
Mongan draws attention to the variety of graphic techniques employed in these studies. Some were executed rapidly in pencil, while others incorporate brushwork or transparent watercolour. A sheet of figures in the Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, uses restrained washes to distinguish the colours of garments and the effects of sunlight and shadow. Such applications of colour could supplement a drawing without requiring the more sustained execution of a finished watercolour. The written annotations served a related purpose, preserving chromatic information when time or circumstances prevented its immediate representation.
The journey also intensified Delacroix’s interest in horses and mounted figures. His encounters with Moroccan cavalry provided opportunities to observe movements and activities different from those familiar to him in France. He recorded riders engaged in displays of horsemanship, horses at rest and animals struggling under the control of their attendants. Hannoosh’s examination of the Meknes and other notebooks reveals repeated studies of such subjects, sometimes accompanied by descriptions of the animals’ behaviour. The drawings preserve individual postures and movements that could later enter his paintings of mounted encounters, although the circumstances of their execution belong first to the observations made during the journey.
Horsemen Preparing to Ascend a Hill – Louvre
The people he encountered were no less important. In Tangier, the Jewish merchant Abraham ben Chimol acted as an interpreter and guide, providing Delacroix with access to his family and their domestic surroundings. The artist made numerous studies of Jewish women in their elaborate ceremonial dress, recording faces, jewellery and costume. Mongan describes several sketches of Ben Chimol’s daughter in the Chantilly album, while a more developed watercolour of the young woman in wedding attire formed part of the album presented to Mornay after the expedition.
These studies were made within circumstances of access and restriction that shaped what Delacroix could observe. His familiarity with Ben Chimol’s household enabled him to record subjects unavailable during more public encounters, while other environments remained difficult to enter. His celebrated visit to a domestic interior in Algiers, arranged shortly before his departure for France, provided an opportunity to study women, garments and furnishings at close quarters. The resulting watercolours and annotations contributed to his subsequent representations of North African domestic life.
The Spanish portion of the journey generated a different body of material. Delacroix spent approximately two weeks in Cádiz and Seville, where he drew churches, monasteries, streets and figures in local costume. Hannoosh identifies studies in the Aubry sketchbook that considerably enlarge our knowledge of these excursions. Among them are drawings of religious figures, architectural interiors and details of furniture, as well as studies associated with a woman identified in the artist’s records as María Dolores. The drawings preserve the diversity of his interests, extending from the arrangement of buildings to individual gestures and articles of dress.
The Aubry sketchbook is particularly informative because it contains observations not preserved in the other surviving notebooks. Hannoosh establishes that its drawings of monks and monastic furnishings subsequently supplied material for Delacroix’s Christopher Columbus and His Son at La Rábida (1838). The figures and objects were recorded in different places from those represented in the historical subject. Their presence in the sketchbook demonstrates the specificity of Delacroix’s observations before their eventual adaptation to a pictorial conception.
Gallery of the Dominican Convent in Cádiz – Louvre
For the journey’s immediate aftermath, the album prepared for Charles de Mornay is particularly revealing. During his quarantine at Toulon, Delacroix assembled eighteen watercolours recalling incidents and scenes from the expedition. Mongan distinguishes these carefully composed works from the smaller, more rapid sketches executed on the spot. Their settings and figures are more fully developed, while their colours are often less intense than those employed during direct observation under North African sunlight. Among the subjects were women washing clothes in the countryside, dancers in Tangier and members of Ben Chimol’s family.
Delacroix returned to France with a substantial body of graphic material, much of it preserved in notebooks whose pages brought written observations into close association with drawings. Their range reflects his curiosity about the environments through which he travelled, but their significance also lies in the different degrees of attention devoted to particular subjects. A costume might be recorded through colour annotations, a building through its architectural details, a horse through successive indications of posture, or an encounter through a collection of figures and incidental notes. The sketchbooks retained these distinct kinds of information, available for Delacroix to revisit long after the circumstances that produced them had passed.
Drawing, Memory and Recollection
For Delacroix, drawing offered a means of retaining experiences that might otherwise disappear from memory. He valued the sketch not only for the information it preserved but also for its capacity to recall the circumstances in which it had been made. In a passage discussed by Ashley E. Dunn, he recommended drawing as a particularly valuable accomplishment for travellers. Even a simple pencil sketch might revive memories of a place, the people encountered there, conversations and the feelings associated with an occasion. Such recollections could be more extensive than the information actually represented on the paper. A few lines might recall an entire experience.
The surviving sketchbooks suggest how this process operated. Their contents are seldom confined to a single subject or purpose. Figures, buildings, fragments of landscape, details of costume and written observations appear in close proximity, sometimes reflecting the succession of encounters during a particular day. Maurice Sérullaz regarded these albums as a kind of graphic journal, preserving the continuity of Delacroix’s interests and experiences over many years. Studying the sketchbooks as a whole allows us to see how different observations were recorded together, sometimes revealing connections that would be lost if the drawings were considered separately.
Recollection did not necessarily imply a faithful reconstruction of what had been seen. Delacroix understood that the passage of time could alter the character of an experience, allowing some impressions to retain their force while others faded. His return to the drawings made during the Moroccan journey was particularly revealing. In a reflection cited by Michèle Hannoosh, he wrote: “Je revois mes dessins du Maroc. Mes impressions sont celles d’un autre.” Looking again at his Moroccan drawings, he recognised the distance between his present impressions and those of the person who had originally made them. The drawings preserved an earlier encounter with the world, but they could not restore the precise state of mind in which it had taken place.
Delacroix came to regard this distance as potentially productive. He acknowledged that, following his return from North Africa, he had initially been too concerned with reproducing the details of his experience. Only after some of those details had faded could he recover what he considered to be its more striking and poetic character. This retrospective judgement, discussed by Dunn, establishes a distinction between the accuracy sought during immediate observation and the selective processes involved in later artistic recollection. The passage of time was not merely an obstacle to memory. It could release the artist from a concern with particulars that impeded the development of a composition.
Memory also depended upon repeated drawing. Delacroix sometimes brought together related observations on a single sheet, forming collections of motifs that could be compared and reconsidered. Dunn discusses examples containing multiple studies of lions’ heads and skulls, as well as sheets assembling figures and heads first encountered during the Moroccan journey. Rather than preserving the original sequence of observation, these arrangements placed related forms alongside one another. Repetition offered opportunities to examine differences of posture and expression, while reinforcing the artist’s familiarity with particular subjects.
A double-sided sheet in the Cohen Collection demonstrates a more immediate relationship between observation and remembered movement. On one side, Delacroix sketched horses at rest. On the reverse, he developed an imagined scene of horses galloping, introducing mounted combatants associated with the Orientalist poetry of Byron. Dunn distinguishes the direct study of animals from the reconstruction of rapid movement and the subsequent invention of a narrative encounter. The sheet brings these activities into close proximity. Knowledge acquired from observation could be recalled and reorganised into actions that the artist had not witnessed.
Such exercises accorded with Delacroix’s interest in drawing from memory as a discipline in its own right. His favourable assessment of Élisabeth Cavé’s teaching placed importance upon the assimilation of observed forms, so that the artist might eventually reproduce them without referring continuously to the original subject. Memory was not conceived as a substitute for looking, but as a means of making the results of observation available to invention. Repeated study could establish a familiarity with forms and relationships that allowed the imagination greater freedom in their subsequent use.
A still longer process of reconsideration can be traced through Delacroix’s representations of Sultan Abd er-Rahman. Following the official audience at Meknes in 1832, he made drawings reconstructing the ceremonial encounter. When he developed The Sultan of Morocco and His Entourage in 1845, the composition underwent significant changes. Dunn describes the omission of the French delegation, the alteration of the format and the increasing emphasis upon the ruler himself. Delacroix returned to the subject again in 1856, modifying the arrangement of attendants and the character of the scene. Across these works, an experience initially recorded as a diplomatic event became the basis of successive pictorial interpretations, each shaped by the artist’s changing interests.
Literature, Theatre and the Imagination
Literature provided Delacroix with some of his most enduring subjects. He was an avid reader of poetry, drama and fiction, drawn particularly to works in which violent passions, conflicts of character and moments of crisis offered opportunities for pictorial expression. Shakespeare, Goethe, Byron and Walter Scott occupied a prominent place in his imagination. Drawing allowed him to pursue these interests independently of the demands of a finished painting, exploring an incident through successive compositions or translating the force of a literary passage into a few rapidly executed lines.
His enthusiasm for Goethe resulted in one of his earliest substantial ventures into lithographic illustration. Published in 1828, the series devoted to Faust presented episodes from the drama in a graphic language that departed from conventional literary illustration. Delacroix was interested in the supernatural and psychological dimensions of Goethe’s work, especially the encounters between Faust and Mephistopheles. The lithographs offered considerable freedom in their treatment of light and darkness, gesture and setting. Their dramatic contrasts were particularly suited to a narrative in which the visible world is repeatedly disturbed by forces beyond ordinary experience.
Goethe himself admired the illustrations. Having seen them through the mediation of Johann Peter Eckermann, he praised Delacroix’s imaginative power and remarked upon the artist’s ability to convey the scenes with greater force than he had envisaged them. His response was particularly significant because Delacroix had not approached the text as a series of incidents requiring literal transcription. The images interpreted its dramatic character, sometimes departing from the descriptions of the original.
Delacroix was similarly attracted to Goethe’s earlier drama Götz von Berlichingen (The Knight with the Iron Hand), which he encountered in French translation in 1823. He considered illustrating it as early as 1824, and a sketchbook of 1827 contains a list of possible subjects. The project occupied him intermittently for nearly two decades. Among the surviving studies is a drawing in brown and blue wash for the episode in which the wounded Götz is rescued by gypsies. The drawing, discussed by Ashley E. Dunn, preserves the principal arrangement of the scene while allowing the figures and their surroundings to emerge through relatively broad tonal passages.
Historical costume was another consideration. A study dated 10 March 1838 records Delacroix’s attention to the dress appropriate to the narrative, while a later drawing of a weary horse relates to his reconsideration of the same episode. Although he completed seven designs, the intended lithographic series was never published. Four wood engravings after his drawings appeared instead in Le Magasin pittoresque in 1845. The drawings preserve different stages of a project that changed both in conception and in its intended means of reproduction.
His engagement with Shakespeare was more extensive still. Delacroix had begun reading and translating passages from the plays in 1819, and his visit to England in 1825 strengthened an enthusiasm that continued throughout his career. The performances of English actors in Paris offered another means of encountering the drama. Of Shakespeare’s plays, Hamlet exercised a particularly sustained fascination, giving rise to paintings, drawings and a series of lithographs developed over many years.
Delacroix’s Hamlet illustrations were conceived as an extended graphic interpretation of the tragedy. Rather than illustrating every stage of the action, he selected encounters in which gestures and relationships between figures could express a decisive psychological moment. Hamlet’s confrontation with his mother, the appearance of his father’s ghost, Ophelia’s distress and the graveyard scene all provided subjects for repeated investigation. He began the lithographic series in the 1830s, suspended it during work on his major decorative commissions and resumed it in the early 1840s.
The drawings associated with the graveyard scene offer a particularly revealing example. Delacroix had treated Hamlet’s encounter with the skull of Yorick in an independent lithograph of 1828 and in paintings of 1835 and 1839. When he returned to the episode for the later series, he developed another version on tracing paper. Dunn identifies several changes from the painting of 1839. Hamlet moves more actively towards the grave, Horatio turns away from the central action, and the skull is repositioned in relation to the figures. The gravedigger’s scythe also becomes more clearly visible. These alterations modify the dramatic relationships without requiring an entirely new composition.
The use of tracing paper was important to this process. It allowed Delacroix to retain an established design while adjusting individual gestures, contours and intervals between figures. In his Journal, he reflected upon the improvements that could result from making a second drawing closely based upon an earlier one. The revised version might eliminate unnecessary details and introduce greater elegance, even when it followed the first almost exactly. For literary illustration, such revisions could sharpen the expression of a scene whose principal elements had already been determined.
Another drawing on tracing paper represents Hamlet and Laertes at the Tomb of Ophelia. The confrontation at Ophelia’s grave brought together grief, accusation and physical struggle. Delacroix worked out the responses of the assembled figures, including Horatio’s intervention. Although the design was omitted from the published series of 1843, it appeared in a posthumous edition. The preparatory drawing provides evidence of Delacroix’s continuing exploration of the dramatic possibilities of the graveyard scene.
Byron supplied subjects of a different kind. Delacroix was particularly attracted to the violent passions and exotic settings of the English poet’s narratives. The Giaour, translated into French by Amédée Pichot in 1824, prompted a number of graphic and painted compositions. In The Giaour on Horseback, a pen-and-ink drawing in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the rider’s headlong movement is conveyed through the energy of the line. Dunn associates the drawing with Byron’s description of the Giaour’s furious ride. The graphic treatment concentrates upon the speed and agitation of the figure rather than the detailed reconstruction of a setting.
Delacroix’s literary interests were closely connected with his experience of the theatre. He attended performances throughout his life, responding to acting, gesture and costume as well as to the dramatic text. These interests occasionally found expression in his own theatrical designs, but the surviving sketchbooks also show him observing performances simply to preserve their visual character.
On 29 June 1855, he attended a performance of Othello by a visiting English company at the Théâtre Impérial Italien in Paris. His sketchbook contains rapid graphite studies of the principal actors in different poses. Their gestures and costumes are recorded with considerable economy, supplemented by annotations concerning colour. As Dunn explains, the notes would have allowed Delacroix to return to the sketches afterwards and develop them further in watercolour. The drawings register a succession of appearances rather than a single, elaborately composed scene.
His account of the performance in the Journal reveals how strongly the tragedy affected him. He admired its dramatic progression, the accumulation of emotional force and the increasing intensity of the action. The experience renewed his sense of Shakespeare’s power and furnished impressions that he expected to retain. Drawing at the theatre thus brought together his response as a spectator and his habitual practice of examining expressive movement.
The stage also entered Delacroix’s graphic work through satire. In Theatrical Troupe on the Road (1818), an early drawing intended as a study for a lithograph, he ridiculed contemporary dependence upon the conventions of French classical drama. Volumes by Racine, Voltaire and Crébillon accompany the travelling performers, while their theatrical equipment invokes an antiquated repertoire of classical subjects. The drawing belongs to a youthful phase of graphic caricature, yet it also reveals how closely Delacroix associated artistic invention with questions of literary taste.
His satirical treatment of opera in Théâtre Italien and Le Grand Opéra, published in 1821, pursued a related contrast. Rossini, represented as a vigorous modern composer, is accompanied by characters from his operas, while the established French institution appears as an ageing performer dependent upon crutches. Delacroix’s command of caricature offered a means of expressing his preferences within contemporary musical and theatrical culture, years before his critical reflections acquired their more sustained form in the Journal.
Delacroix’s involvement with caricature extended beyond the theatre. Between 1814 and 1822, he produced sixteen satirical prints, drawing inspiration in part from English caricaturists such as Thomas Rowlandson, James Gillray and George Cruikshank. Ashley E. Dunn identifies drawings in which Delacroix copied and rearranged figures from prints by Gillray and Cruikshank, studying their methods of comic exaggeration and characterisation. His admiration for English graphic satire proved enduring. In 1854, he recorded in his Journal his appreciation of the draughtsmanship of caricatures published in Punch.
A more personal example appears in a sheet of drawings now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, A Lioness and a Caricature of Ingres, dating from the 1850s. Alongside a study of a lioness, Delacroix drew a small caricatured profile believed to represent his artistic rival Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. Sandra K. Stelts has suggested that the caricature may date from the period of their rivalry over Delacroix’s election to the Institut de France, eventually achieved in 1857. The identification remains an interpretation rather than a documented certainty, but the drawing offers a revealing instance of Delacroix’s continuing inclination towards graphic satire, long after his early experiments in the genre.
Drawing as Invention
Delacroix attached particular importance to the first sketch, or première pensée, in which the idea of a composition took visible form. He regarded this initial conception as more than a provisional arrangement of figures. In his Journal, on 23 April 1854, he described the sketch as the embryo of the idea, already containing the essential elements of the work. The danger lay in losing its unity during execution, when attention to individual details might weaken the expression of the original conception. For Delacroix, the sketch offered a direct relationship between thought and the movement of the hand, before the demands of a finished painting imposed their own restrictions.
Maurice Sérullaz places this principle at the centre of Delacroix’s understanding of drawing. The earliest graphic indication might possess a vitality that became more difficult to sustain as the composition developed. Delacroix returned to the problem in 1859, reflecting upon the sacrifices required to preserve the impression of the first sketch. Elaboration did not necessarily mean improvement. The artist had to distinguish between details that strengthened the conception and those that threatened to obscure it.
The preparations for the Salon du Roi at the Palais Bourbon provide an opportunity to follow this process. Commissioned in 1833, Delacroix devised a decorative programme representing four principal forces of the state: Justice, Agriculture, Industry and War. The scheme extended across the ceiling, the piers between the doors and the spaces above the doors and windows. It required him to reconcile the movement of individual figures with the architectural divisions of the room.
Among the surviving studies are three sheets of premières pensées for the Salon du Roi, in which Delacroix explored possible personifications of War. Executed with rapid pen strokes, the drawings bring figures together in violent combat, their forms suggested through energetic movements rather than detailed elaboration. Ashley E. Dunn draws particular attention to the struggle between figures in one of these sheets. A related drawing in the Louvre, Study for Mars on His Chariot, helps connect the preliminary conceptions with Delacroix’s developing ideas for the decorative scheme. The final design, however, was considerably more restrained, with allegorical figures arranged to accommodate the architectural setting.
Study for Mars on His Chariot, c. 1833
Other studies for the same room disclose a different kind of invention. In developing the allegorical figures, Delacroix sought arrangements that would remain legible within the architectural setting. His preliminary drawings range from rapidly indicated groups to more restrained compositions in which the relationship between figures and the surrounding space has been clarified. The requirements of monumental decoration made revision essential. A satisfactory arrangement on paper did not necessarily retain its effectiveness when adapted to a particular wall or ceiling compartment.
The Chapel of the Holy Angels in Saint-Sulpice, where Delacroix worked between 1854 and 1861, offers another revealing sequence. A sheet of Studies of a Horse and Rider for Heliodorus Driven from the Temple, now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, contains several alternatives for the mounted angel who drives Heliodorus from the sanctuary. In one study, Delacroix established the horse through vigorous curved lines, suggesting its movement and weight before resolving its anatomy. The rider is indicated more briefly, with an elevated arm that would eventually hold a spear. Elsewhere on the sheet the figure leans further forward, while a third study in graphite approaches more closely the arrangement adopted in the mural.
These drawings illustrate the method Delacroix called dessiner par boules, or drawing by rounded masses. Rather than beginning with fixed contours, he explored the volume and movement of figures through rounded forms and sweeping lines. Dunn traces the development of this procedure from relatively literal constructions of ovoid shapes during the 1830s to the freer graphic language of the Saint-Sulpice studies. The method enabled Delacroix to investigate the movement of a figure as a whole before determining the position and appearance of its individual parts.
His preparatory work was not confined to imaginative sketches. Direct observation could enter at a comparatively advanced stage in the development of a painting. For Scenes from the Massacres at Chios, exhibited at the Salon of 1824, Delacroix made studies of a female cadaver, recording the head from several angles in graphite. The sheet, now in the Cohen Collection, relates to the elderly woman seated towards the centre-right of the finished composition. As Dunn explains, none of the studies corresponds precisely to the figure’s eventual pose or expression. Delacroix drew upon his examination of the dead woman’s features to develop an image of suffering appropriate to the historical subject.
The distinction between observation and invention is especially clear in this example. The drawing records the appearance of an actual body, while the painting gives that observation a different emotional and narrative purpose. Its subject was the massacre of Greek inhabitants of Chios by Ottoman forces in 1822, an event that had provoked widespread indignation in France. Delacroix’s studies allowed him to investigate the physical characteristics through which an imagined victim of that violence might be represented.
The elaborate decorative projects of his maturity required further means of developing and transmitting compositions. For the library of the Palais Bourbon, commissioned in 1838, Delacroix devised a programme embracing science, philosophy, law, theology and poetry. The five principal divisions occupied the cupolas, while smaller narrative and allegorical subjects filled the pendentives. The architectural framework imposed particular difficulties upon the arrangement of figures, and drawings on tracing paper became an important part of the preparatory process.
The Education of Achilles, intended for a pendentive in the section devoted to poetry, illustrates Delacroix’s willingness to reconsider an arrangement over successive stages. The young Achilles is represented riding upon the centaur Chiron, who instructs him in hunting. In the preliminary drawings, Delacroix explored the relationship between the two figures before revising their disposition to suit the architectural space. The successive studies reveal adjustments to the movement and proportions of the group, as well as to its placement within the composition.
A related example is The Tribute Money, another subject from the Palais Bourbon library. A drawing on tracing paper preserves an arrangement in which Christ and Peter are surrounded by witnesses. In a subsequent version, Delacroix removed a young boy who had appeared among the figures. The alteration was modest but significant: an element of the composition had been sacrificed to clarify the larger arrangement. Such revisions exemplify the practical application of his conviction that individual details must remain subordinate to the principal idea.
Tracing paper also had an important place in the organisation of the work itself. Louis de Planet, one of Delacroix’s assistants, recalled the artist bringing him a sketch for The Tribute Money and instructing him to trace it, square the tracing for enlargement and transfer the composition to the canvas. The account supplies direct testimony concerning the passage from a relatively small preparatory drawing to monumental execution. It also shows how Delacroix’s graphic designs communicated his intentions to the assistants engaged upon the decoration.
For Jacob Wrestling with the Angel, another of the Saint-Sulpice murals, Delacroix prepared a developed presentation sketch in oil over pen and ink on tracing paper. Now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, it occupies a position between graphic study and painted composition. The drawing establishes the struggle between Jacob and the angel within a wooded setting, while the oil passages give an indication of the colouristic treatment envisaged for the mural. Dunn considers it probably the most developed of the studies submitted to the commissioners for approval. The work demonstrates how Delacroix could adapt the resources of drawing to different stages of a commission, from the exploration of an initial idea to the presentation of a proposed design.
The variety of these procedures is striking. Pen and ink allowed Delacroix to register an idea rapidly; graphite supported the investigation of form; tracing paper facilitated revision and transfer; and the introduction of oil colour helped communicate the intended appearance of a monumental painting. None of these methods followed an invariably prescribed sequence. Their employment depended upon the particular demands of the work, and upon Delacroix’s determination to preserve the force of his first conception through the successive stages of its development.
Pastel and the Exploration of Colour
Although Delacroix is celebrated above all as a colourist, his use of pastel has attracted less attention than his work in oil or watercolour. Yet the medium occupied a place in his artistic practice throughout his career. Lee Johnson, in his study of Delacroix’s pastels, estimates that the artist produced approximately a hundred works in the medium, ranging from preparatory studies to independent compositions. The surviving examples encompass figures, portraits, flowers, landscapes and skies. They reveal an artist interested not simply in the brilliance of colour, but increasingly in the subtle relationships between neighbouring tones.
Pastel had enjoyed considerable prestige in eighteenth-century France, particularly in portraiture, before declining in favour during the Neoclassical period. Delacroix’s early interest is documented in a school exercise book of 1815, where he noted an encyclopaedia article on the technique. Johnson identifies the likely source as Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie, which praised pastel for the ease with which a work could be interrupted, resumed and corrected. There is no evidence that Delacroix began practising the medium immediately, but his later work demonstrated an appreciation of precisely these advantages.
Delacroix’s interest in pastel may have been encouraged by his experience of drawing in chalk, which shared some of the medium’s properties. He particularly admired Pierre-Paul Prud’hon, whose studies in black and white chalk on blue paper achieved the soft transitions and velvety shadows associated with pastel. Lee Johnson compares a Female Nude by Delacroix, dating from about 1820, with a similar drawing by Prud’hon of approximately ten years earlier. He identifies affinities in their treatment of flesh and illumination, although the resemblance cannot establish direct influence, since chalk drawing was a familiar part of academic training.
A more immediate acquaintance was the painter and collector Jules-Robert Auguste, who was drawn to Orientalist subjects and experiments in pastel. Delacroix was sufficiently attached to Auguste’s work to retain at least nine of his pastels, which he subsequently bequeathed to artist friends. Johnson proposes that Auguste may have encouraged Delacroix’s exploration of the medium, although the precise nature of any technical exchange remains uncertain. Auguste’s work offered examples of colouristic effects that differed considerably from the restrained chalk drawings associated with Prud’hon.
Pierre-Paul Prud’hon, Standing Female Nude, a black chalk drawing — Google Arts & Culture
Delacroix’s most concentrated early experiments occurred during his preparations for The Death of Sardanapalus, exhibited at the Salon of 1827. A remarkable group of pastel studies accompanied the development of the painting, allowing him to investigate the colours and textures of flesh. Johnson emphasises their richness of hue and the freedom with which Delacroix explored contrasts between different complexions and illuminated surfaces. Pastel could provide a brilliance and softness that he sought to translate into the finished oil painting. The studies are especially significant because he never again employed the medium so extensively in preparation for a single work.
Studies for The Death of Sardanapalus, 1827 — Musée du Louvre
The experiment belonged to a period in which Delacroix was closely associated with artists who were themselves interested in the possibilities of colour. Richard Parkes Bonington, for example, had been experimenting with distemper following his visit to Venice in 1826. Johnson suggests that such work may have encouraged Delacroix’s attempts to reproduce in oil the freshness of lighter, more immediate techniques. The relationship remains conjectural, but it places the Sardanapalus pastels within a wider artistic interest in the interaction between different media.
In later years Delacroix’s use of pastel became more restrained. Johnson identifies an important development in the studies for Women of Algiers in Their Apartment (1834), where the effects of daylight upon local colour receive particular attention. The pastel studies preserve a relatively brilliant palette, but the completed painting subjects those colours to a more carefully controlled illumination. Johnson singles out the treatment of a skirt, whose colouring becomes more subdued in the painting while retaining the variations introduced by light. The comparison reveals a developing interest in the way colours change according to their surroundings, rather than in their independent intensity.
Eugène Delacroix, Seated Arab Woman and Study of Buttons
A comparable concern appears in the pastel studies for the decoration of the library at the Palais Bourbon. Here Delacroix investigated restrained half-tones in relation to the more brilliant paintings intended for the surrounding architectural spaces, seeking a satisfactory balance across the decorative programme.
A related exploration of tonal harmony appears in Saint Stephen Borne Away by His Disciples, an independent subject developed for an easel painting. In a pastel study, pale greens, blues and ochres are blended to create a subdued atmospheric harmony. Johnson associates this development with Delacroix’s increasing conviction that the general tonal structure of a painting should be established before the introduction of pronounced effects of light and shadow.
Delacroix’s concern with tonal harmony is also apparent in Arch of Convolvulus, a pastel study associated with the oil painting Basket of Flowers Overturned in a Park. The study concentrates on the surrounding vegetation, exploring subtle variations of green that would contribute to the larger composition. Johnson draws attention to the restraint of these tones and their role in establishing the setting for the more brilliant colours of the finished painting.
Delacroix also made independent pastel studies of flowers, approaching their forms with close attention to botanical particularity. Johnson emphasises that, despite the imaginative freedom characteristic of much of his painting, Delacroix generally sought fidelity to natural appearances in these works. He studied individual blossoms, their forms and colours, without systematically altering their characteristics for expressive purposes. The variety of the resulting arrangements arose from the combination of observed forms rather than from their transformation into something fantastical.
Pastel was particularly suited to direct observation. Unlike watercolour, its colours did not change as they dried, allowing the artist to judge their relationships immediately. It could also be carried and used outdoors without elaborate equipment. These advantages became especially valuable when Delacroix turned to the changing appearance of the sky. During the later 1840s and early 1850s, he produced a group of studies devoted to clouds, sunlight and atmospheric colour. They constitute the largest coherent body of work in pastel within his surviving production.
Among the most compelling is Sunset, dating from about 1850, in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The study records sunlight emerging from behind a bank of clouds, with cool blue-grey tones set against warmer passages of yellow, pink and orange. Ashley E. Dunn relates the pastel to an entry in Delacroix’s Journal describing an evening walk with his friend Frédéric Villot in 1850. On that occasion, Delacroix observed the contrast between warm illuminated areas and cooler shadows, noting how the juxtaposition of opposing tones heightened their brilliance. His written observations help to explain the colour relationships he was investigating in the pastel.
These observations were not concerned merely with identifying the colours of clouds or sky. Delacroix investigated their changing appearance as illumination shifted, considering how a colour could acquire greater intensity through contrast with its neighbours. His written reflections show particular interest in the blues and greys of shadow, the warmer colours of clear sky and the relationships between them. Pastel enabled him to examine such effects directly, preserving impressions that might disappear before a more elaborate study could be completed.
The sky studies were not necessarily independent of Delacroix’s larger ambitions as a painter. In 1850, while preparing the ceiling of the Galerie d’Apollon in the Louvre, he recorded making a pastel of sunlight with the projected decoration in mind. Johnson also cites an instance in which Delacroix altered an oil sketch for Apollo Slays Python by applying pastel to the sky, achieving an effect that had eluded him in the original medium. Such experiments reveal his willingness to move between drawing and painting in pursuit of a particular colour relationship.
Yet the atmospheric studies also possess an interest apart from any identifiable commission. Their subjects required no elaborate narrative, historical setting or arrangement of figures. The appearance of clouds, the passage of sunlight and the relationships between changing colours were sufficient to occupy Delacroix’s attention. In these works, the investigation of natural effects becomes a pictorial subject in its own right.
Although he occasionally produced finished pastels for friends, collectors or sale, Delacroix never exhibited a pastel at the Salon. Johnson distinguishes his practice from that of later artists who devoted themselves to establishing pastel as an independent medium of major artistic ambition. For Delacroix, its value lay principally in the freedom it offered for experiment, the study of nature and the development of pictorial ideas. Its adaptability allowed him to investigate everything from the warmth of human flesh to the passing effects of evening light.
The Freedom of the Sketch
Delacroix’s admiration for the sketch extended beyond its usefulness in preparing a painting. He believed that an image could gain expressive force by leaving certain things unresolved, inviting the spectator to complete what the artist had only suggested. This principle informed both his graphic work and his handling of paint, helping to explain the looseness of execution that so often troubled his contemporaries. What critics sometimes regarded as a failure to finish was, for Delacroix, a means of engaging the imagination.
In his study of Delacroix’s aesthetic ideas, George P. Mras examines the literary and theoretical sources of this conviction. Reviewing the Salon of 1827, the critic Étienne-Jean Delécluze dismissed The Execution of the Doge Marino Faliero as little more than a brilliant sketch. Other works were similarly criticised for promising more than they delivered. Such judgements reflected an understanding of artistic finish in which precise contours and carefully resolved surfaces were regarded as essential qualities of accomplished painting.
Delacroix saw the matter differently. In his Journal on 9 May 1853, he argued that the sketch of a painting or monument, like a ruin, could affect the imagination more powerfully because something remained for the mind to supply. The comparison was revealing: the missing portions of a ruin did not necessarily diminish its effect, but could enlarge the range of associations awakened by what survived. Returning to the question on 26 October, he observed that the greater definition achieved through completion could restrict the imagination, which responded more freely to broad indications than to a precise account of every detail.
Mras traces the ancestry of these ideas through eighteenth-century writing on art. Denis Diderot had recognised the expressive power of the sketch, while Sir Joshua Reynolds argued that an abbreviated drawing could engage the imagination more actively than a fully elaborated work. Delacroix knew Reynolds’s writings and drew upon a tradition of aesthetic reflection that gave intellectual support to his own practice. His defence of expressive freedom did not, however, amount to a rejection of discipline. As Mras emphasises, Delacroix remained wary of imagination when it escaped the guidance of reason. Even Rubens, whom he admired profoundly, could be criticised for excessive invention and the accumulation of unnecessary accessories.
Drawing offered an especially flexible means of balancing definition and suggestion. Maurice Sérullaz distinguishes between Delacroix’s precise descriptive lines and the more abbreviated marks through which he could communicate movement and character. Delacroix himself attached importance to the relationships between principal lines, recognising that individual marks acquired their expressive force through their place within the larger arrangement. The apparent spontaneity of his drawings was frequently supported by repeated correction and refinement. Their freedom was a matter of artistic judgement rather than an absence of control.
Pen and wash provided another means of exploring the expressive possibilities of suggestion. In A Choral Group of Five, a drawing discussed by Ashley E. Dunn, the contrast between dark washes and untouched white paper gives the figures an indistinct, almost spectral presence. The particular occasion represented cannot be established, although Delacroix’s Journal records his frequent attendance at musical performances and his responsiveness to their emotional effects. Dunn relates the drawing to his belief that music could stimulate the imagination without communicating a precisely defined subject.
The drawing’s incomplete definition is central to its effect. The figures remain recognisable, but their setting and identities are left uncertain. Dunn interprets this withholding of information as an invitation to the spectator’s imagination. Delacroix allows the forms to emerge from the surrounding darkness without resolving every feature, leaving the viewer to participate in their reconstruction. The drawing gives sufficient indication of its subject to awaken associations that a more fully descriptive image might have confined.
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Bibliography
These are the sources. Any errors are mine.
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Delacroix, Eugène. Journal. Edited by Michèle Hannoosh. 2 vols. Paris: José Corti, 2009.
Dunn, Ashley E. ‘Delacroix as a Draftsman: Through the Lens of the Karen B. Cohen Collection’. In Delacroix Drawings: The Karen B. Cohen Collection. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2018, pp. 13–47.
Hannoosh, Michèle. ‘Delacroix in Morocco and Andalusia: Rediscovered Notebooks and Drawings’. The Burlington Magazine 165 (March 2023), pp. 226–257.
Johnson, Lee. Delacroix Pastels. London: John Murray, 1995.
Mongan, Agnes. ‘Souvenirs of Delacroix’s Journey to Morocco in American Collections’. Master Drawings 1, no. 2 (1963), pp. 20–31.
Mras, George P. ‘Literary Sources of Delacroix’s Conception of the Sketch and the Imagination’. The Art Bulletin 44, no. 2 (June 1962), pp. 103–111.
Sérullaz, Maurice. ‘L’œuvre dessinée d’Eugène Delacroix’. In Dessins d’Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863), vol. 1, Inventaire général des dessins, École française, Musée du Louvre, Cabinet des dessins. Paris: Réunion des musées nationaux, 1984, pp. 7–23.
Stelts, Sandra K. ‘Delacroix on Ingres: A Caricature’. Master Drawings 20, no. 4 (Winter 1982), pp. 374–376, 422.
