Eugene Delacroix
French Romantic Painter, 1798-1863
For 40 years Eugene Delacroix was one of the most prominent and controversial painters in France. Although the intense emotional expressiveness of his work placed the artist squarely in the midst of the general romantic outpouring of European art, he always remained an individual phenomenon and did not create a school. As a personality and as a painter, he was admired by the impressionists, postimpressionists, and symbolists who came after him.
Born on April 28, 1798, at Charenton-Saint-Maurice, the son of an important public official, Delacroix grew up in comfortable upper-middle-class circumstances in spite of the troubled times. He received a good classical education at the Lycee Imperial. He entered the studio of Pierre Narcisse Guerin in 1815, where he met Theodore Gericaul
ID: 62528 Hamlet and Horatio in the Graveyard 283 x 214 mm Biblioth?que Nationale, Paris Delacroix discovered Shakespeare in 1825 on a trip to London, where the celebrated Edmund Kean was playing Richard III. In Paris, the equally famous Talma - whose town house was decorated by Delacroix - did much to popularise Shakespeare's work in French. Delacroix saw Hamlet in Paris, in the company of Hugo, de Vigny, Dumas, Nerval and Berlioz. The Shakespearean hero, imperfect, immoderate and immature, was perfectly adapted to Delacroix's temperament, and gave free rein to his imagination; in his hands, the hero could be completed and perfected. It was, of course, Hamlet who most fascinated Delacroix. "Alas, poor Yorick! - I knew him, Horatio: a fellow of most infinite jest..." (Act V, Scene 1). The scene of Hamlet and Horatio in the Graveyard inspired a painting and a series of lithographs which mirror the development of his art as a whole. Author: DELACROIX, Eug?ne Title: Hamlet and Horatio in the Graveyard Form: graphics , 1801-1850 , French , other
