Sketchbook Saturday – Eugène Delacroix

Some history today, via the early sketches of the artist who painted the most famous work of the French Revolution.

Eugène Delacroix, the famous French Romantic artist, had a passion for notes and sketches and made them wherever he went. These are from his time in North Africa. (View of Tangiers, from one of the Morroccan albums)

In 1832, the already well known Delacroix (34) accompanied a French diplomatic mission to Morocco, which fired his imagination. He filled several notebooks, notating sketches like the one shown above for March 15: “Went into the mountains and, after some way, discovered the great valley in which Meknes [Morocco] is located.”

Years later, Delacroix wrote about his time in North Africa and the sketches he made there that could serve as a helpful guide for artists today about how to approach their own sketching.

“I began to make something tolerable of my African journey only when I had forgotten the trivial details and remembered nothing but the striking and the poetic side of the subject. Up to that time, I had been haunted by this passion for accuracy that most people mistake for truth.”

“Learn to draw,” he wrote, “and in returning from travel, you will carry with you memories. . . . That simple mark of the pencil . . . recalls, along with the place that struck you, all the associations connected with it . . . a thousand delicious impressions.”

This is the only known oil sketch for Delacroix’s masterpiece Liberty Guiding the People (La liberté guidant le peuple), respresenting a pivotal moment in French revolutionary history. (credit: Christie’s auction house, here. )

The painting, which now hangs in the Louvre, commemorates the July Revolution of 1830 which toppled the deeply unpopular King Charles. Go here for a summary of the visual elements of the painting.

“This is one of the Louvre’s paintings so famous it has taken on a life of its own,” writes Samuel Spencer on Culture Trip. “Liberty Leading the People has inspired everything from the Statue of Liberty, Les Misérables to Coldplay’s Viva La Vida album cover. A founding image from which modern France takes much of its identity . . . it is one of art’s most stunning representations of ‘liberté, égalité, fraternité’, and one of the most potent depictions of revolution ever painted.”

If you have time and are deeply interested, the Louvre produced this documentary (with lecture) a few years ago. It’s subtitled and can be scanned.