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PLATE I.--THE ENTRY OF THE CRUSADERS INTO CONSTANTINOPLE. Frontispiece
Painted in 1841 for the Gallery at Versailles, whence it was subsequently removed to the Louvre, this large, dramatic composition belongs to the period when Delacroix's palette, inspired from the first by Rubens and Veronese, had assumed increased richness under the influence of Eastern light and colour. It is significant of the lack of appreciation shown to the master by his contemporaries, and even by his supporters, that the commission was accompanied by the request that the picture should not look like a Delacroix.
[Illustration: PLATE I.--THE ENTRY OF THE CRUSADERS INTO CONSTANTINOPLE.]
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ILLUSTRATED WITH EIGHT REPRODUCTIONS IN COLOUR
I. The Entry of the Crusaders into Constantinople . . . Frontispiece In the Louvre
II. Algerian Women in their Apartment In the Louvre
VII. The Execution of the Doge Marino Faliero In the Wallace Collection
VIII. Faust and Mephistopheles In the Wallace Collection
"Delacroix, lac de sang, hanté de mauvais anges, Ombragé par un daïs de sapins toujours vert, Où, sous un ciel chagrin, des fanfares étranges Passent comme un soupir étouffé de Weber." --Baudelaire, "Fleurs du Ma1."
To-day, as one examines the ten masterpieces by Delacroix in the Salle des États at the Louvre--ten pictures which may without fear of contradiction be asserted to form an epitome of the art of the man who is now generally acknowledged to be the fountain-head of all modern art--one can only with difficulty understand the bitter hostility, the fierce passion, aroused by these works when Delacroix's name was the battle-cry of the moderns, when Delacroix was the leader of the numerically small faction which waged heroic war against the inexorable tyrannic rule of academic art. What was once considered extreme and revolutionary, has become what might almost be described as a classic basis of a revaluation of æsthetic values. Even Manet's "Olympia," the starting-point of a more recent artistic upheaval, a picture which on its first appearance at the Paris Salon of 1865 was received with wild howls of execration, now falls into line at the Louvre with the other great masterpieces of painting. It marks a bold step in the evolution of modern art, but it is no longer disconcerting to our eyes. And Delacroix can no longer be denied classic rank. To understand the significance of Delacroix in the art of his country, and the hostility shown to him by officialdom and by the unthinking public almost during the whole course of his life, one has to trace back the art of painting in France to its very birth. It will then be found that the history of this art, from the moment when French painting emerges from the obscurity of the Middle Ages until well into the second half of the nineteenth century, is a history of an almost uninterrupted struggle between North and South.