Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

The Journal of Eugène Delacroix is one of the most important works in the literature of art history: the record of a life at once public and private, it is also one of the richest and most fascinating aesthetic documents of the nineteenth century, as Delacroix reflects throughout on the relations between the arts, especially painting and writing. Indeed, he approaches the question from a unique perspective, that of a painter who wrote extensively and theorized his own writing in the Journal , a painter who had a passion for literature and a powerful literary imagination, a narrative painter whose work is rooted in literature and the literary.


This book is the first to explore the crucial importance of this relation for Delacroix's aesthetic theory and artistic practice. Countering the long critical tradition which sees his writing as the inverse of his painting, it argues that, through his diary and art criticism, he sought to develop a painter's writing, proper to painting itself, and that such a writing is closely related to his conception of pictorial art. This approach has significant implications for interpreting the narratives of his public decorations, four of which are analyzed here: the library schemes of the Senate and the Assemblée Nationale, the Apollo Gallery in the Louvre, and the Chapel of the Holy Angels at the church of Saint-Sulpice. Delacroix's ideas on the theoretical and practical relations between writing and painting, narrative and the image, are shown to be central not only to his aesthetic, but also to his views on civilization, history, and culture, and on the role of the artist in the modern world.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

CHOICE Review

Delacroix wrote his Journal during two periods: from 1822 to 1824 and from 1847 to 1863, the year of his death. The person that emerges from the 23-year hiatus is fully formed and erudite--a worldly observer of people and, of course, of the arts. It is on the latter section of the diary that Hannoosh (French, University College, London) focuses her study. In an early chapter, the author addresses the fragmentary, often contradictory nature of the Journal, finding in the "give and take of multiple perspectives ... the sole means of approaching truth" and the artist's "irresistible attraction to the unfinished." In a subsequent chapter there is a discussion of Delacroix's abandoned project, the Dictionnaire des Beaux-Arts, its partial incorporation in the diary, and a wide-ranging analysis of impinging aesthetic issues, including commentaries on past masters and technical matters of colors and their interplay. Delacroix's last great monumental commissions, the decorations for the Bourbon and Luxembourg Palaces and the Galerie d'Apollon in the Louvre, occupy the last section of the book. This is a highly specialized study, intricately argued, with copious, pithy notes. Perhaps too advanced for most four-year colleges. Upper-division undergraduate; graduate; faculty. L. R. Matteson University of Southern California

Author notes provided by Syndetics

Michele Hannoosh is Professor of French at University College London. She is the author of Parody and Decadence: Laforgue's "Moralités légendaires" and Baudelaire and Caricature: From the Comic to an Art of Modernity.