page_title: Eugène Delacroix
section_title: Musical Inspirations
hierarchical_section_title: Eugène Delacroix / Musical Inspirations
context_page_description: Ferdinand Victor Eugène Delacroix was a French Romantic artist regarded from the outset of his career as the leader of the French Romantic school.
  In contrast to the Neoclassical perfectionism of his chief rival Ingres, Delacroix took for his inspiration the art of Rubens and painters of the Venetian Renaissance, with an attendant emphasis on colour and movement rather than clarity of outline and carefully modelled form. Dramatic and romantic content characterized the central themes of his maturity, and led him not to the classical models of Greek and Roman art, but to travel in North Africa, in search of the exotic. Friend and spiritual heir to Théodore Géricault, Delacroix was also inspired by Lord Byron, with whom he shared a strong identification with the "forces of the sublime", of nature in often violent action.
  However, Delacroix was given to neither sentimentality nor bombast, and his Romanticism was that of an individualist. In the words of Baudelaire, "Delacroix was passionately in love with passion, but coldly determined to express passion as clearly as possible."
context_section_description: Delacroix drew inspiration from many sources over his career, such as the literary works of William Shakespeare and Lord Byron, or the artistry of Michelangelo. But from beginning to end of his life, he was in part characterized by a constant need for music, saying in 1855, "nothing can be compared with the emotion caused by music; that it expresses incomparable shades of feeling." He had said, while working at Saint Sulpice, that the music put him in a state of "exaltation" which inspired his painting. It was often in music, in the most melancholy renditions of Chopin, or the "pastoral" works of Beethoven that Delacroix was often able to draw the most emotion and inspiration. At one point during his life, Delacroix befriended and made portraits of the composer Chopin; in his journal, Delacroix praised him frequently.
caption: Medea about to Kill Her Children, 1838
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