Art: Childlike Monster

“When I was a child,” said Eugene Delacroix, “I was a Monster.” In time the monster grew a mustache and became famous for his wit, his dandyism and his fierce, flamboyant art, which now fills one-third of the Louvre’s 19th Century tier of honor. But Delacroix’s leaping, flesh-tearing lions, burning cities, shipwrecks and hard-riding Moors suggest that, being a true child of his age, he never quite outgrew his childhood. According to one of the painter’s closest friends, Poet Charles Baudelaire (who also gave life quite a Peter Panning), savagery was “the most precious part of [Delacroix’s] soul, the part devoted entirely to painting his dreams and to the cult of his art.”

Baudelaire explained what he meant in an essay written in 1863, when Delacroix died, and now published for the first time in English (Delacroix; Lear, Crown; $5). To the world, Bachelor Delacroix was the urbane, self-confident son of a prosperous lawyer—obviously gifted, and smooth as silk in company. To his friends, he was “like the crater of a volcano artistically hidden by bouquets of flowers.” Wrote the author of Flowers of Evil:

“Even the physical characteristics of his face, his Peruvian or Malayan skin, his large black eyes narrowed by intense concentration and as if drinking in the light, his thick and shiny hair, his stubborn forehead, his tightly shut lips conveying an expression of cruelty … in fact, his whole being suggested that he was of exotic birth. More than once as I looked at him, I thought of … Montezuma whose practiced hand could in a single day sacrifice three thousand human creatures on the pyramid-like Altar of the Sun. . . .

“The moral in his works . . . also bears a visible Moloch-like stamp. . . . Cities smoking and in flames, slaughtered victims, raped women, even children hurled under horses’ hooves or cringing under the dagger of delirious mothers—all his work, I say, resembles a terrible hymn composed in honor of doom and irremediable sorrow.”