DELACROIX, Eugène. Painter, b. at Charenton St-Maurice on 25 Apr. 1794, d. in Paris on 13 Aug. 1863.
Initially a pupil of Guérin (1816) and later of the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris (1818), after a journey to Italy he turned decisively toward research into new expressive means. Generally regarded as the typical representative of French pictorial Romanticism in opposition to Ingres, who was esteemed the most characteristic expression of Classicism, E. D. is to be considered not only as a great colourist but also for his power to create images through energetic brushwork that both draws and models forms within a dense chromatic mass. Spontaneous, passionate, emphatic, he opposed to the characteristic descriptive and conclusive methods of the traditional intellectualist academy the rights of free fantasy and the ardour for pure pictorial research. After painting admirable small works full of impetus and heroic impulses, and large compositions on historical subjects or of literary inspiration such as *The Barque of Dante* (1822), *The Death of Sardanapalus* (1827), *The Battle of Taillebourg* (1837), he also produced large mural compositions such as the frescoes in the Palais Bourbon and the Luxembourg Palace, some of them on religious subjects, such as the frescoes in the Chapel of the Holy Angels in the church of St-Sulpice in Paris (1861).