Death of Sardanapalus What Makes Art an Exampe F Reaism

Replica painting of
The Expiry of Sardanapalus, in
the Philadelphia Museum of Art
Past Eugene Delacroix.

Background

A member of a distinguished and artistic family unit, Delacroix trained under the highly respected bookish painter Baron Pierre-Narcisse Guerin (1774-1833), knew the neat history painter Antoine-Jean Gros (1771-1835) and was a regular visitor at the social salon of Baron Francois Gerard (1770-1837). But while he may take been one of the best-connected figures in French painting - someone who rubbed shoulders with several eminent practitioners of academic fine art and its 'official' idiom of neoclassical painting - Delacroix was essentially a rebel. In his early years (he was just xxx when he presented this work at the Paris Salon), he was carried away by his instincts, his imagination and energy, also as his beloved of colour. The latter derived from his admiration of Titian and Venetian colour painting - and especially the Venetian ideology of colorito - as well as the work of Rubens. For Delacroix, colour added vitality, movement, and urgency, and would always transcend the obsession with precision drawing initiated past Michelangelo (the champion of disegno), and promoted in the 19th century by the French Academy. As one of the great Romantic artists of his solar day - admitting, one blessed with a thorough and orthodox training - Delacroix constituted an of import counterpoint to the more than buttoned-up style of neoclassical art, exemplified by the harmonious compositions of J.A.D. Ingres (Delacroix's detail bugbear) and others. See besides his other great masterpiece, Liberty Leading the People (1830, Louvre, Paris).

Analysis of The Expiry of Sardanapalus by Delacroix

The Decease of Sardanapalus followed difficult on the heels of Delacroix's two earlier successes - his mythological painting The Barque of Dante (1822, Louvre) and his historical work The Massacre at Chios (1824, Louvre) - both of which aroused strong feeling in the critics, although both were bought by the state.

Probably the best-known example of Orientalist Painting - it is based on the legend of the Assyrian King Sardanapalus, as told by the aboriginal Greek historian Diodorus of Sicily. It takes as its starting indicate the romantic poem by Lord Byron, published in 1821, which depicts Sardanapalus not as a tyrant, only as a hedonistic Oriental monarch - as a "liberal" whose simply wish is the happiness of his people. A major military defeat leaves him caught like a rat in a trap. His palace besieged, he first secures his Queen's safety, and and then, together with his favourite, throws himself onto a pyre erected round his throne.

The composition shows the bearded Sardanapalus lounging (upper left) on a sumptuous divan, in the midst of an orgy of death and destruction. As a prelude to his own suicide, he has just ordered all his palace possessions to be destroyed and his concubines put to decease. Meantime he watches apathetically as his eunuchs and soldiers slash the throats of his concubines, horses and slaves, while off to the right nosotros can just glimpse the night smoke of the growing pyre.

This huge canvas (measuring roughly 13 10 16 feet, four X five metres) explodes earlier our optics in a convulsive orgy of movement and colour. The manner the scene scatters into all directions, the sheer anarchy of the moving-picture show, completely shocked the commentators. Etienne-Jean Delecluze (1781-1863), for example, art critic on the Journal des debats, alleged: "the eye cannot extricate itself from this maelstrom of line and color". A far cry from the motionless neoclassical pictures of Jacques-Louis David and J.A.D. Ingres.

The incredible dynamism of the painting derives from the assymetrical nature of its diagonal structure, the writhing, distorted bodies, and the swirling lines of the composition, as well as the shocking contrast in colours between the white of the female person nudes, the black of the eunuchs and the blood scarlet of the divan - all executed in wide, loose brushstrokes. The treatment of colour in this particular piece of work was influenced by Delacroix's study of English watercolour painting and by his contact with John Lawman and JMW Turner, too as Richard Parkes Bonington, during his visit to England in 1825.

A smaller, more expressive and even more richly coloured replica of The Decease of Sardanapalus, was painted by the artist in 1844, and now hangs in the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Interpretation of Other 19th Century Paintings

• The 3rd of May, 1808 (1814) by Goya.
Prado Museum, Madrid.

• The Valpincon Bather (1808) by J.A.D. Ingres
Louvre, Paris.

• La Grand Odalisque (1814) by J.A.D. Ingres
Louvre, Paris.

• A Burial at Ornans (1850) past Gustave Courbet.
Musee d'Orsay, Paris.

• The Creative person's Studio (1855) by Gustave Courbet.
Musee d'Orsay, Paris.

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