Delacroix: Leading Light of the French Romantic Movement.

The artist formed the link between the traditions of the past and modernism, ultimately having a profound impact upon the Impressionists.

Throughout the career of Romantic painter Eugene Delacroix, his expressive use of color, dynamic compositions, and stirring subjects drawn from literature and contemporary events provoked his critics and endeared him to his champions. Despite the occasional controversy surrounding his submissions to the Paris Salon, an annual government-sponsored art exhibition, Delacroix, born in 1798, built a reputation as one of the foremost French artists of the 19th century. An exponent of a style that made free use of vibrant colors, Delacroix was the lifelong rival of neoclassical painter Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, who advocated a more traditional linear style.

The works produced during the final 15 years of Delacroix's prodigious career are exemplary of his spontaneous painterly style, whereby specific details were subordinated to over-all emotional and visual effect. His late paintings demonstrate perhaps better than his large-scale Salon works those qualities of his art that later artists such as Edouard Manet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Paul Cezanne, and Paul Gauguin admired most. While Delacroix's late works stem from his continued interest in signature subjects--animal hunts, North African motifs, the Greek War of Independence, and scenes from the works of his favorite writers--it is the assurance of his style, mastery of the painted surface, and manipulation of color that had the greatest impact on subsequent painters. With his public reputation more or less secure by 1848--although election to the Institute de France, an important honor for a 19th-century French artist, eluded him until 1857--Delacroix's late works reveal a highly introspective and self-conscious artist consumed by a desire to fine-tune his technique and stake out his place in history.

The period from 1848 to his death in 1863 is marked by several curious contradictions in Delacroix's life and art. He was an urban sophisticate, yet he declared that he felt more comfortable at his country house at Champrosay, near Fontainbleau. While he was an ardent student of nature who executed carefully observed studies of plants and animals, Delacroix insisted that the artist should give free reign to the imagination, even if it meant taking liberties with scientific fact. Raised in a secular milieu and steeped in the writings of Enlightenment philosophers who scorned religious faith as irrational, Delacroix produced an astounding group of heartfelt religious pictures late in his career. Furthermore, while he was seen by many as a progenitor of modern painting, Delacroix aligned his work with the masters of the past and was extremely conservative in his own taste and manners, frequently expressing distaste for modernity.

Reflective of his carefully considered theories concerning color and technique, many of which are recorded in a journal that he kept from 1822 to 1824 and took up again in 1847, Delacroix's paintings nonetheless were dismissed by some critics as unfinished and sloppy in execution. Lastly, while Delacroix's pictures, particularly those from his later career, convey a spirit of loneliness and isolation, he enjoyed an active, almost frenetic, social life, frequenting the opera, theater, and gatherings of other artists, writers, and musicians, counting the writer George Sand and the composer and musician Frederic Chopin among his dearest friends.

Delacroix, a voracious reader and an accomplished thinker in his own right, was raised in an extremely cultivated environment. His mother, Victoire Oeben, was the daughter of a renowned cabinetmaker to Louis XV. It has been suggested, although without documentary evidence, that Delacroix's father was not Charles Delacroix, briefly Minister of Foreign Affairs and later ambassador plenipotentiary to the Netherlands, but Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand, the French statesman and principal negotiator of French foreign policy in the wake of the Napoleonic wars.

Delacroix's early career was marked by the monumental canvases he submitted to the Salon and for which he is best-known today: "The Barque of Dante" (1822), "The Massacre at Chios" (1824), "The Death of Sardanapalus" (1827), and "Liberty Leading the People" (1830). In these large-scale pictures, Delacroix showed his penchant for literary subjects and his sympathy for the cause of the Greeks in their struggle for independence from the Ottoman Empire. Delacroix had a particular affinity for the writings of George Lord Byron, the English Romantic poet, who died on the shores of the Adriatic at Missolonghi in 1824 while demonstrating his own allegiance to the cause of Greek independence.

"The Death of Sardanapalus," perhaps Delacroix's most notorious painting, was inspired by Byron's 1821 play Sardanapalus about a hedonistic Assyrian king who ordered all of his prized possessions destroyed with him on his funeral pyre. The artist's vision of a tangled mass of bodies amid the decadent excess of the exotic interior saturated with rich color established Delacroix's position at the vanguard of Romantic painting. Despite the largely hostile reaction to its exhibition, Delacroix remained attached to the controversial picture, retaining it in his studio until 1846. Prior to the sale of file original painting to an English patron living in France, Delacroix painted a small-scale replica.

Contrasting the direct and spontaneous 1827 sketch for the original canvas with the carefully considered 11846 study represents the passage of time from rash youth to deeply reflective maturity. In his later works, Delacroix frequently revisited the subjects of previous paintings, often replicating the compositions of images executed much earlier in his career in later versions. This reflective mood, for instance, produced four versions of a climactic moment from Byron's poem, "The Bride of Abydos."

Literary influences

Delacroix's literary interests ranged from classical poetry to contemporary novels. While the scope of his reading was vast, Delacroix restricted the number of authors he selected as sources for painting subjects to fewer than 10. In addition to Byron, Dante Alighieri, William Shakespeare, Sir Walter Scott, Ludovico Ariosto, Torquato Tasso, and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe were among his preferred authors. His attachment to specific works by these writers inspired graphic art as well as paintings. In 1828, Delacroix produced a set of 17 lithographs illustrating Goethe's Faust to accompany a new French translation. His lithographs illustrating Shakespeare's Hamlet and Goethe's play Gotz yon Berlichingen appeared in 1843. During the 1850s, Delacroix returned to the authors who had been so important to him early in his career, relying on his memory of suggestive passages to stimulate his imagination.

In 1832, Delacroix accompanied the Count de Mornay, King Louis-Philippe's envoy to the Sultan of Morocco, to Spain and North Africa. While them, Delacroix kept a journal of notes and sketches that was to provide an important source of inspiration for the rest of his career. From Meknes, in Morocco, Delacroix wrote, "At every step there are ready-made pictures." Moroccans, he felt, preserved the noble bearing of ancient Romans and Greeks, vestigial traces of which otherwise were apparent only in classical sculpture. Using his Moroccan sketches and detailed notes as a guide, Delacroix strove to capture this natural grace in his painted figures. Late in his career, he produced a number of paintings stemming from memory, filtered through his active imagination, of this sojourn in Morocco.

After achieving renown at the Salon, Delacroix received important government commissions to paint murals decorating the interiors of public buildings in Pads. In 1833, he began to decorate the Salon du Roi in the Palais Bourbon (now Assemblee Nationale). Other commissions included the cupola and half-dome of the library of the Senate in the Palais du Luxembourg (1840-46) and the ceiling of the Galerie d'Apollon in the Musee du Louvre (1850-51). Delacroix's decorative cycle for the Salon de la Paix in the Hotel de Ville was completed in 1851, but destroyed by fire during the Paris Commune in 1871. Delacroix's most famous murals were executed for the chapel of Saint-Anges in the church of St. Sulpice (1850-61), Paris: "Heliodorus Driven from the Temple," "Jacob Wrestling with the Angel," and, for the ceiling, "St. Michael Defeating the Devil."

Beginning in the 1840s, Delacroix spent more time in the country and at the seashore, staying either at his house at Champrosay, in Normandy, or with Sand and Chopin at Nohant, where he dedicated himself to landscapes. Captivated by gardens and the study of flowers, Delacroix devoted 1848 and 1849 almost exclusively to a series of flower portraits, exhibiting two of these pictures at the Paris Salon of 1849: "Basket of Fruit in a Flower Garden" and "Basket of Flowers Overturned in a Park." In response to these pictures, one critic wrote: "Delacroix has caught the secrets of flowers and their casualness, subsequently translating them for us with that impulsive energy he is known for."

In 1855, the French government bestowed upon Delacroix the honor of a full retrospective in the fine arts building at the Exposition Universelle in Paris. Delacroix's arch rival, Ingres, was given a space of equal size, thus setting the scene for a direct comparison of the two artists' works. For a government commission to paint a subject of his own choosing, Delacroix produced the monumental "Lion Hunt," an image that combined the artist's imaginative invention with his observations recorded at the Paris zoo in the company of animal sculptor Antoine-Louis Barye. It was Delacroix's last major grand-scale composition submitted for public exhibition during his lifetime. As such, it represents the culmination of the artist's preoccupation with Orientalist subjects, hunts and battles, and animals. While reaction to the "Lion Hunt" was mixed, the retrospective exhibition as a whole represented a triumph for the artist.

Delacroix's election to the Institute de France in 1857 after seven previous attempts crowned the honors accorded to the artist during the last decade of his life. An exhibition of his paintings during the final 15 years of his life, "Delacroix: The Late Work," is on view at the Philadelphia (Pa.) Museum of Art through Jan. 3, 1999.

Mr. Miller works in the Department of European Painting Before 1900, Philadelphia (Pa.) Museum of Art.