Eugène Delacroix: (The Death of) Sardanapalus (1827) and Liberty Leading the People (1830)

Read my extended analysis of these works at DEAN - my personal weblog

Click image above for reviews or to buy this overview of the life and works of Delacroix

Delacroix was a revolutionary French Romantic painter and is credited as introducing the use of ‘structural colour’ as a method to govern the way the eye of the viewer moves over the picture plain. He used the distribution of colour within some of his major works as a way to direct how we actually look at his paintings and read the narrative they contain. He was heavily influenced by the British literary Romantics and, in turn, was a major influence on the French Impressionists.

Delacroix knew that the place that the average human viewer wants to rest their gaze within a composition is slightly left of centre. If you divide these works in half horizontally and then in half vertically, you find the centre of the composition…. and slightly to its left, we find... nothing of interest. There is no reward, nothing to hold our interest, so the eyes look for something more satisfying.

In Liberty, his most famous work, we are attracted either to the yellow of the dress, or the red section of the flag. This keys us into those colours and then our eyes pick out the flashes of reds and yellows scattered around the composition. This is what gives the painting its sense of movement. Our eyes do not rest easy but are dragged from one key colour detail to the next. This movement of our eyes lends movement to the figures that are actually painted in a very posed manner, static as statues – which, in turn, gives the scene its sense of grandeur and historic import.

He had used the same technique with Sardanapalus: slightly left of centre, our eyes find nothing to ‘hold on to’, so it is the red swathe that thrusts diagonally up through the composition, or the ivory white of the sultan’s robes that attract our attention, and then our eyes find the scattered rhythm of these two colours throughout the rest of the canvas. This gives the arrangement of quite static figure studies the atmosphere of a decadent orgy.

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Liberty Leading the People is discussed in a short video at the Khan Academy