Data Bases • Custom Term Papers • Free Term Papers • Free Research Papers • Free Essays • Free Book Reports • Plagiarism? Links • Top 100 Term Paper Sites • Top 25 Essay Sites • Top 50 Essay Sites • Search 97,000 Papers @ DirectEssays.com • Search 101,000 Papers @ ExampleEssays.com • Search 90,000 Papers @ MegaEssays.com Free Essays • Term Paper Sites • Chuck III's Free Essays • Free College Essays • TermPaperSites.com • My Term Papers • Get Free Essays • Essay World • Planet Papers	Search Lots of Essays Back to Subjects - Art The Formal Analysis of Liberty Leading the People by Eugene Delacroix The Formal Analysis of Liberty Leading the People by Eugene Delacroix Ferdinand Victor Eugene Delacroix was born on April 26, 1798. Delacroix was the son of Charles Delacroix and Victoire Oeben. His father served for a short period of time as a minister of foreign affairs. At the time of Delacroix’s birth his father was on a mission to Holland as ambassador of the French Republic. Delacroix’s mother was a descended of artisans and craftsmen. His parents both died early. His father died in 1805 and his mother in 1814. After his mothers death he was left in the care of his older sister, Henriette de Verninac. When Delacroix was at the age of seventeen, in 1815, he began to take painting lessons from Pierre Guerin. While there he met Theodore Gericault, a romantic painter, and became heavily influenced by him and his work. Delacroix’s first painting, The Barque of Dante, was accepted by the Paris Salon in 1822 that marked the beginning of his artistic career. He was a French painter whose work influence extended to the impressionists and exemplified 19th century romanticism. He remained the dominant French romantic painter throughout his life. Delacroix’s use of colors influenced both neo-impressionist and impressionist painters. Delacroix created more than 850 paintings, drawings, murals and other works in his career. Delacroix’s most influential work and most romantic is Liberty Leading the People. It was also called “le 28 Juillet and La Liberte conduissant le people aux barricades”. The French Revolution, 1830, inspired the last of his paintings to be called Romantic. Delacroix’s technique was using applied contrasting colors, creating a vibrant effect with small brush strokes. The impressionists were greatly influenced by this. This painting showed the division between the romantic style and the neoclassical style. Romantic style emphasized spirit and color detachment and line. This painting is responses to the July 1830 revolution against Charles X who is the King of France. According to the book Painting in the Lourve romanticisms is a movement that arose in the early nineteenth century in art, literature, and music. Romantic painting was characterized by emotionalism and fascination with the exotic. It reached its peak about 1830 in France, England and Germany. Some principles of Romanticism are that the emphasis is on feelings, especially on personal feelings rather the general or community feelings. Some personal feelings are love affairs, illness, duels, suicides, and madness. Another emphasis is on emotion rather than reason. Romantic artists had the love of the exotic and fantastic. They explored the extremes. Dream worlds were invented. Dreams were commonly the source of inspiration. The feeling of many Romantic artists is nationalism. Mystical attachment to the world is what Romantic painters had. Landscapes and seascapes is what painters turned to. Featured were natural phenomena and storms. They focused on real nature rather than enlightenment. Delacroix and his friend also a painter, Eugene Lami, went out to watch the fighting. The fighting erupted not far from his studio. Delacroix wrote to his brother (a general) “Since I have not fought and conquered for the fatherland I can at least paint on its behalf.” That’s why he painted Liberty Leading the People. Delacroix had no similarity for politics. His attitude toward social reform was intrinsically detached and laisseiz-faire. Nevertheless, his attention was compelled by the political crisis in France. Everyone’s concern had become politics. Liberty Leading the People is sort of a political poster. It marks the day when the people rose and dethroned the Bourbon King. The new king Louis Philippe bought Liberty Leading the People but never exhibited it. King Philippe bought the work of art for 3,000 francs. It remained in storage for eighteen years. It was brought out in 1848. The government of Louis Philippe awarded Delacroix with the Legion of Honor. Delacroix made a number of sketches. They contained street fighter, individually and in groups. He decided to construct his artwork around the allegorical female representing Liberty. This was a daring concept. Having the bloodstained victims of an actual battle and setting a high-flown symbolic figure in the middle of the dirt. Delacroix’s Liberty figure although clearly a symbol, marks a transition from the fleshier, more realistic woman of his early career to the smooth-skinned, straight-nosed and monumental creatures that will be seen in different dress and settings in many later paintings. This work is obviously charged with symbolic and meaning. The painting was done between October and December 1830, the exact time of the Three Glorious Days. Liberty Leading the People identifies its beginnings and invites us to place it in exact historical context. Liberty Leading the People is a two-dimensional painting. Delacroix uses linear perspective to give the effect of 3-dimensional space. He uses aerial perspective with the city in the back being smaller and the sky is blue and gray. The style of this work is very realistic. The battle of July Revolution of 1830 is the subject matter. The meaning of the image, content, is the people wanting Liberty and the battle the people went through to gain liberty and Liberty leads the people on. Line can imply direction and movement also outline shapes and forms. Most of the figures are outlined with a black line. Some are a little thicker than others. With implied line you can get the direction and where someone is looking. Liberty is looking at the man wearing the top hat. The man holding himself up is looking at Liberty. Delacroix’s lines are quick, fluid and imprecise, flurry of curves, linear webs and knots. The medium used allows for blending for the shading. No hatching or cross-hatching was used. The space is two-dimensional but uses a sense of depth of three-dimensional space by the means of illusions. This is done by the objects closer to us appear larger that the objects farther away. Another way to show the illusion of three-dimensional space is having the objects closer to us overlaps or covers the objects behind them. This is how Delacroix used to show depth. The woman is show as a symbol of Liberty. Delacroix uses color to show atmospheric or aerial perspective. Objects that are farther away appear less distinct and are often bluer in color or cooler. He uses atmospheric perspective with the hazy sky and the buildings in the city being a very cool color. He uses many different tints, adding white to a hue, and shades, adding black to a hue, of brown, red, blue, and black. The picture’s effect uses lines in the extraordinary brilliance of chiaroscuro and color. Much of the work is done in low-key colors. Meaning that the colors used are low on the key scale of that color. An example is the color brown is a dark brown, which would be on the low part of the scale. The light source is coming from behind Liberty. The Lightest areas are around Liberty and the dark areas are around the outside of Liberty. Delacroix uses time by freezing that moment, as if he took a photograph of what happened at that moment. Delacroix loves to use texture in his work. Much of it is visual texture. Visual texture is an illusion, something appears to the actual texture but it is not. To achieve visual balance an artist use either one of the following, symmetrical balance, asymmetrical balance, or radial balance. Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People is asymmetrically balanced. The two sides are not a mirror image of each other but the both possess about the same visual weight. The focal point of this work is Liberty. The emphasis is on Liberty because she is the most important figure in the work. Liberty stands out more than the other figures because she is caring the flag with bright colors of red, blue and white. Liberty Leading the People is very much in scale and proportion. The art is in proportion because the relationship between the parts to each other and to the whole is done very well. No figure is larger than any other figure. An example is the young man to the right of Liberty is not larger than the older men to the left of Liberty. The figures are in scale because the figures are the normal or expected size. The shape (hands, arms, feet, torso, head) is all in the right scale to an actual part of a person. Delacroix’s spirit is fully involved in its implementation of Liberty Leading the People. He executes the work with the heroic poses of the people fighting for liberty, the out stretched figure of liberty, the dead figures, and the attitudes of the people following liberty. Delacroix has given this painting a sense of full participation. This work was, called by Argan, the first political work of modern painting. The graveyard makes up the foreground. Higher up in the painting is the smoky battlefield. Sprawled out are the dying and the dead. Delacroix is said to be the gentleman in the top hat. He painted his own face and it does resemble some of his self-portraits. In the center is Liberty holding the France flag. Gazing up at Liberty is a wounded man lifting himself up on his arms. Delacroix crops off the top of the flag, which is a daring move. It gives the painting a feeling of spontaneous action. It also gives the since that Liberty is breaking out of the formal frame of the picture. Derived from many sources is Delacroix’s concept of Liberty. He shows liberty as a half woman of the people and half goddess. One source was form the summer of 1830 from a popular ode. The ode described Liberty as “this strong woman with powerful breast, rough voice and robust charm”. Another source was from a similar figure illustrated for Byron’s poem Chide Harold. In Liberty Leading the People the half draped woman shows the allegorical figure of liberty. The woman is wearing the traditional Phrygian cap of Liberty. Liberty is holding the tricolor in one hand and a gun in the other. To use Lenormants word Liberty is said to be” a young, strong brilliant woman, dressed like one of the people, but shining with an unknown light, odd, however, in the nudity of her shoulders, the bonnet on her head, the standard that moves in her hand”. The static position of Liberty makes the entire work more dynamic. There are three men to the left of Liberty. They are in different categories of workers. The man with the saber is the factory worker. The man with the gun, sometimes called a student or a bourgeors, is the foreman, artisan or the chief of the workshop. The man kneeling at Liberty’s feet is the worker from the country. He is employed in the building trade. A cavalryman and a Swiss guard are the tow dead soldiers to the right of Liberty. They belong to the royal guards’ regiment. Perfectly identifiable are the weapons and bits of uniform. With the greatest accuracy is how they were painted. Easily missed is a beautiful touch, a glimpse of old Paris through gun smoke, flying from the Cathedral of Notre Dame is a tiny tricolor flag, and washed and weathered by history is a row of ancient houses. The setting was completely impossible at the time especially with Notre Dame and the cathedral hidden by houses. To suit his convenience without losing the necessary verisimilitude is how he arranged the setting. Shown at the Salon of 1831, the painting was understood in various ways. Working class, a fishwife, and a whore is what the figure of Liberty was called by some people. Critics said that the painting was “A slander” of the five glorious days that Liberty was “ignoble” and that the insurgents represented a rude class of people, urchins and workmen. Delacroix’s daring in reworking and renewing the traditional iconography was not recognized by some critics. The work became popular to some. Its popularly was symbolized by its use on a postage stamp in 1982 and on the hundred-fran bill in 1779. Some were still offended by the bare breasts of Liberty. Liberty Leading the People stands out for its return to classicism, theme, use of allegory and its composition. The throne room of Palais du Luxemboury was the intention of where it was to be hung. It was to remind the king of how he became to be sitting there. It was hung only for a few months in the palace museum. Times grew difficult and it was taken down. Today it is hung in the Louvre in Paris. It is hanging with four other paintings by Delacroix. Two of them include Woman of Algiers and Sardanapalus. Delacroix is sometime compared to Gavroche even though Gavroche was born much later. He was born twenty years after the painting was done. Delacroix took a trip to Morocco at the end of 1831. His paintings were inspired by the culture. His sketchbooks gave insights into a foreign land. Many artists did copies of some of Delacroix’s works. Some were Vincent van Gogh, Picasso, Renoir, Cezanne and Manet. Cezanne made versions of several of Delacroix works. Cezanne made a copy of Liberty Leading the People. “Thin, delicate, with a rather cold and reserved countenance but with a simplicity that did not exclude elegance” was once how Delacroix was described. Delacroix moved back across the Seine to the Left Bank, in the final years of his life. He cut himself off from most of the world and his social life. He did this so he could concentrate on his work. He kept returning to his Moroccan journey for themes. His visions were of violent animal and human combat. They filled up his mind. Over time his style had become purified and refined. His brush strokes were bolder, more confident and vigorous. His colors were cleaner and brighter now. His compositions are more direct and simpler. Delacroix died in Paris on August 13, 1863. Since his death his apartment has been changed into a museum. The museum gives future generations insight into his work and his life. Bibliography: Reference to Internet Sites http://sunsite.dk/cgfa/delacroi/delacroix_bio.htm http://encarta.msn.com http://www.nga.gov/cgi-bin/pbio?7900 http://painting.about.com/library/bidelacroix.htm?once=true& http://www.discoverfrance.net/France/Art/Delacroix/Delacroix.shtml Reference to Books Henry M. Sayre, A World Of Art (New Jersey:Prentice-Hall,Inc 2000), p477 Tom Priddeaux, The World of Delacroix (New York:Time Inc 1966), p101-104,174-177 Walter Friedlaender, David to Delacroix (Massachusetts: Harvard University Press), p113-114 Barthelemy Jobert, Delacroix (New Jersey:Princeton University Press),p128-133 Lawrence Gowing, Paintings in the Louvre (New York:Stewart, Tabori & Chang, Inc. 1987), p672 Word Count: 2344
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