Description
Book SynopsisFocuses on Eugène Delacroix’s fascination with the idea of civilization and the ways this idea informed the artist’s writing, murals, and paintings of North Africa and animals.
Trade Review“Combining careful readings of Delacroix's paintings and prose, David O'Brien offers fascinating insights into the artist's perception of the modern world and its disenchantment. The figure that emerges is complex, conflicted, and driven by a deep ambivalence toward civilization. O’Brien successfully renews our vision of Delacroix by elaborating a subtle dialogue between formal analysis and intellectual biography.”
—Neil McWilliam,author of Dreams of Happiness: Social Art and the French Left, 1830–1850
“David O'Brien makes an original and compelling argument about Delacroix’s treatment of civilization and barbarism. He shows masterfully how this prominent theme reflects the painter's grappling with modernity, with consequences for his conception and practice of painting. The result is a new perspective on some of Delacroix’s most interesting works, including a brilliant chapter on his paintings of wild animals and another on his North African subjects. This is a crucial addition to the literature on Delacroix and on nineteenth-century art more generally.”
—Michèle Hannoosh,author of Baudelaire and Caricature: From the Comic to an Art of Modernity
“A thoughtful, wide-ranging, and utterly relevant exploration of Delacroix’s own version of the clash of civilizations, rooted in the artist’s reading of history and in his attitudes and convictions regarding human nature. In a suite of elegant and illuminating demonstrations, David O’Brien shows how Delacroix’s thinking, as it developed, powerfully shaped key pictures by the artist—just as they in turn shaped the attitudes of Delacroix’s audiences.”
—Marc Gotlieb,author of The Plight of Emulation: Ernest Meissonier and French Salon Painting
“A beautiful, well-researched volume on 19th-century French painter Eugene Delacroix’s general philosophy and specific paintings.”
—R. J. Goldstein Choice
“O’Brien has provided a model for art historians after the cultural turn in the humanities, reinserting a sensitive assessment and analysis of style into the making of meaning.”
—John P. Lambertson Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide
“O’Brien’s book puts forward a strong and convincing argument eloquently supported by his insightful reading of Delacroix’s writing, aptly and enticingly paired with his paintings. The painter’s invocation of primitive realms in counterpoint to his dark view of modernity resonates throughout nineteenth-century culture and art, as it still does to this day.”
—Nina Athanassoglou-Kallmyer CAA.Reviews
“As a threshold figure and an artist of paradoxes, Delacroix will probably always remain somewhat elusive. But under O’Brien’s masterly care, the artist is rendered more scrutable. . . . This thoughtful examination of Eugène Delacroix’s meditations in prose and paint will be of use to scholars in many fields, but especially to those eager to put aside conventional ways of framing the mid-nineteenth-century French art world and to embrace its complexities.”
—Heather Belnap H-France
Table of ContentsContents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Delacroix’s Civilization
2. Civilization and Mural Painting
3. The Primitive and the Civilized in North Africa
4. Delacroix’s Wild Kingdom
Conclusion
Appendix: The Paintings in the Library of the Bourbon Palace
Notes
Bibliography
Index
