KEY POINTS:
Art in Paris is inexhaustible. There is always something to explore in the work of even the most famous of artists.
One of the greatest French painters of the first half of the 19th century was Eugene Delacroix (1798-1863). His most iconographic painting in the Louvre is Liberty Leading the People. Endlessly reproduced, even on stamps, it depicts a heroic woman brandishing a Tricolor on the barricades of revolution. She is the image of France representing an heroic and idealistic search for freedom.
Equally impressive in the Louvre is Delacroix's massive painting The Death of Sardanapalus. The subject is taken from a poem by Lord Byron and it's a reminder of the status of Byron in Europe as the greatest of Romantic poets. Delacroix was a great Romantic, so poet and painter are equally matched in the rendering of a turmoil of death and destruction.
In the vast, dramatic canvas Sardanapalus is depicted as having everything he values - horses, women, treasure - destroyed after he has been defeated in battle.
The Louvre is the first and most familiar place for the appreciation of Delacroix, but there are other reminders of his genius in Paris.
Walking through the Luxembourg Gardens in the morning among the trees, courts, children playing and innumerable joggers, near the Luxembourg Palace you will find a monument to Delacroix. It is one of the finest memorials in the city.
Delacroix was a handsome man with a swaggering turn of the head apparent in his magnificent self-portrait in the Louvre. This pride is caught in the monument in the portrait bust which tops a fountain adorned with tributes paid by Beauty (nude), supported by Time (old) and admired by Apollo (godlike).
Not far away is the grand church of St Sulpice. This massive church acquired extra, unwanted notoriety with the publication of The Da Vinci Code. In the church a brass line runs across the floor and a tall pinnacle is topped by a sphere. In the novel this played a part in the code, but in reality it is a monument to an experiment by the Academy of Science to establish latitude. Nearby a small note explains this and rather acerbically denies any connection with "a popular novel".
Just inside the church door is a much greater glory: a side-altar with three exceptionally large paintings by Delacroix, done between 1854-61. The chapel is very dark and the paintings in desperate need of cleaning.
The ceiling painting is impossible to decipher, yet the two immense wall paintings are filled with driving energy. It is the energy that separates them from the solemn 19th-century painting that fills the other side-chapels.
On one side of the chapel is The Struggle of Jacob with the Angel. This is set in a wood dominated by a magnificent tree. While his flocks and herdsmen pass by in a cloud of dust, Jacob is locked in a night-long wrestle with the Angel of God as described in Genesis 32:28. The Angel calmly and effortlessly deals with the violent struggles of the muscular Jacob. The Bible story is often interpreted as the struggle of the individual will against the will of God, and it is apparent that Jacob will emerge chastened by the conflict. As a result of the whole incident he earns the name Israel.
There is another painting of conflict on the opposite wall. This is The Expulsion of Heliodorus from the Temple. The setting this time is a grand representation in perspective of the interior of the temple in Jerusalem.
Heliodorus had been sent by the Selucid king to take the treasures of gold and silver from the temple. In response to the prayers of the High Priest a vision appeared of an angel clad in golden armour and riding a magnificent horse. Delacroix painted horses superbly and this is no exception. Accompanying the equestrian angel are others who swoop down to beat the prostrate Heliodorus. The temple treasures, wonderful still-life in themselves, lie in confusion on the floor. In this struggle the angels are again effortlessly successful.
The whole scene is thought of as prefiguring Christ driving the money-changers from the Temple.
To work on these tremendously vigorous paintings, Delacroix moved from the Right Bank to the South and established himself in an apartment and a specially built studio in the Rue Fustenberg, an easy walk from St Sulpice.
Today his studio is the Musee Delacroix and well worth a visit. It has a charming garden and the studio is lit by a large window giving the light the painter needed.
Among the paintings is a self-portrait much less well known than the Louvre painting, done when the painter was just out of his teens. The young painter is wrapped in a long black cloak. It is sometimes thought he is posing as Hamlet. Others think he is a figure like Edgar, Master of Ravenswood, in Walter Scott's Bride of Lammermoor.
Either way it is a highly romantic image of the artist whose work is the essence of Romanticism.
