Eugene Delacroix Wrestled With More Than Angels

Eugene Delacroix was described by his friend Charles Baudelaire as “a volcanic crater artfully concealed behind bouquets of flowers”.  He remains in many ways an enigma, where  his personality and inner life can be drawn from his art, his tragic childhood losses, and  conjectured by reading the correspondence to various persons during his lifetime.

This peak into his psyche is therefore an interpretation of the above, but primarily more authenticated in  how he expressed himself in his letters.

My post was prompted in part by visiting his last apartment, the Musée Delacroix in Paris at 6 Rue Furstenberg, right across the small poetic Place Furstenberg in the 6th arrondissement.

The Louvre museum writes about him on their website: “Discovering the art of Delacroix is like going on a whirlwind journey through the deepest troughs of suffering, fear, despair and to the highest peaks of intense rapture and energy’.

Though there weren’t any therapists during his lifetime, had he lived today, I would have loved to have been his therapist, given the mystery that surrounds him and his apparent convoluted personality.

In the art world, Delacroix was to become famous as being the leader of Romanticism, a school of art that preceded the Impressionist movement.

This celebrated artist left us his majestic paintings, frescoes, lithographs and some of his letters, a small journal, but little else is recorded about him.  He lived for the most part a rather discreet  life and reportedly lead a  solitary lifestyle.

His last atelier connected to his apartment overlooked the lovely garden seen here. 

He was born in 1798, the last of four children, into a well endowed family in Charenton Saint Maurice, a suburb of Paris.  Even his paternity hangs in a mysterious cavern of controversy.

Some claim that Talleyrand, the famous French statesman was his biological father, who was a close friend of the family.

Eugene, who looked different from his siblings,  had a striking resemblance to Talleyrand, though his dark hair colour and olive skin tone did not reflect Talleyrand’s blond hair and pale skin.

To add fuel to this assumption, was the well documented fact that his father had a huge testicular tumour that might have interfered with procreation, if not  completely physiologically, but logistically given that the tumour was massive and weighed almost 16 kilos.

Eugene was born 7 months after the removal of his father’s tumour and there is nothing to denote that he was definitely a premature infant.  The surgeon who removed it, outlined the surgery in detail to be used as a teaching guide.

Eugene was close to his father and if he had doubts to his paternity, it was never commented on by the artist and was denied by his family.

His father who was a government appointed minister, was 17 years older than his mother and died when Eugene was only 7 years old.  When he was 9,  an older brother was killed in the war.

Eugene’s whole youth was to be clouded with the  cruel darkness of premature deaths, which played out being a major theme in his  works.

His mother, who came from an elite family of cabinet makers also tragically died when Eugene was 16.

His sister died when he was 29, and his sister’s child, Charles, whom Eugene  looked after like a brother died when he was 36.

Talleyrand was noted to have taken a keen interest in the life of the young artist to be and he was enrolled in the Louis Le Grand lycee, still a renown high school on what is now Blvd Saint Michel.

Aside from his studies, including both latin and greek, he took music lessons from a great organist who tried to convince his mother that he should be a musician.

In his adolescence, talented drawings were noted in his notebooks, and his uncle took him to study at the age of 17 under Pierre Narcisse Guérin.

With the help of Talleyrand his first submission to the salon of 1822,  La Barque de Dante was bought and although it drew initial criticism, he started to be known in art circles of Paris.

In 1824, another submission was heavily criticised for the displayed violence in Massacre of Chios. Eugene painted several famous paintings with the themes of bloody violence, slavery, oppression.

Along with The Battle of Sardanapalus, another painting of epic proportions of cruelty was that of Medea.

As a child who lost both parents before the age of 17, he must have had to guard from being submerged in an ocean of grief, by walling off feelings, in order to survive.

This learned sense of helplessness, that any child would feel by the dying of his parents is tantamount to understanding the inner workings of how Delacroix saw himself as a prisoner of life, yet what was he to do with the anguish, pain and despair?

It is not unusual for young children, who hold an egocentric view of their world, to assume  in their childhood minds responsibility for a parents death, as being “bad” in God’s eyes.  What about the anger he probably felt towards God for leaving him an orphan at age 16.

If he had these feelings, then I can certainly see why many of his  paintings were coloured with death, suffering, oppression, and bloody violence, that he may have secretly held inside, but came out only on his canvases.

The fact that he never married, though had several relationships with women and some shadowy alluding to feelings for males, is another conflictual kink in his psyche.

I suspect that he wrestled with turmoil around his sexual orientation, and the religious conflicts that must have engendered.

He could certainly have developed fears of intimacy also that I have seen often in adults who have lost parents during their childhood.

This stems from a deeply entrenched fear of getting close to someone, and the possibility of losing them in death or abandonment.

His relationship with George Sand, aka Aurore Dupin, who today could very well be described as a transgender, was said to have been a ménege à trois with her lover Chopin, who likewise had  bisexual leanings.

He also had a long relationship with Josephine de Forget that was initially  romantic, yet became later friends.

Delacroix’s most stable and his only life long relationship was with his housekeeper, Marie le Guillou, seen in this painting.  This most curious relationship seemingly was platonic in nature, but who knows?

Her devotion to him makes me think that there were certainly much deeper feelings at play, at least on her part. She always lived within his household, where she had her own room, not on another floor as it was custom for Parisians to house their domestics.

She was the only one who was with him at his death.  In his will, he left her the largest proportion of cash and many pieces of his art.

When I visited his last apartment, now the Musée Delacroix there are several portraits of her and her deceased child.

Adding some overt speculation that Delacroix might have been bisexual was him writing in his journal” I could look forever at images of nude men; such an admirable poem this body,  which I learned to read into and look upon the sight as doing  more for me that any inventions of scribblers”.

This is one of his striking paintings of a male nude.

Although several claim that he was an atheist, in reading his letters, he often quotes scripture and sayings attributed to Jesus Christ.  He also mentioned attending mass, which cast doubts on these statements.

He painted many biblical scenes as well as that of the Virgin Mary.  His struggle with his sexual orientation leanings in light of the teachings of the church at that time, probably caused him much religious distress and contributed to his feelings of helplessness and slavery, both themes seen in his art.

In one of his letters he strongly identified with Christ saying “I am not of this world”.  These feelings of alienation from what he saw as his world caused him much pain.

He often wrote of his sadness and melancholy moods, which makes me think he suffered from periodic depressive episodes.

Enslaved in a world that he desperately wanted to break free of  the chains can be seen in his painting called Liberty Leading The People, where the predominant figure is a bare-chested woman leading revolutionaries.

One of his last commissions was painting frescoes in the Chapelle des Saints Anges in the lovely church of Saint Sulpice.

His Jacob Wrestling with Angels is one of his final works completed in 1861. In my own humble opinion, this acclaimed painting portrays one of the last testimonies of Eugene Delacroix’s internal battles and suffering he never was able to fully express in words nor resolve before his death in 1863.