Delacroix and His Forgotten World

The image of Eugène Delacroix as an august artist with an august oeuvre was initially frozen into place by posthumous tributes and it has continued to the present. He was one of the finest yet least understood painters of the nineteenth century, the golden age of the French Romantic movement. He is remembered best for his masterpiece, 'La Liberté guidant le people', but few of his works have received the kind of constant, fascinated revisiting that has sealed the iconic status of Théodore Géricault's 'Le Radeau de la Méduse', for example. This book is one of the first to look carefully at individual paintings by Delacroix, especially at one of his most important works - a crucial but often overlooked painting from early Romanticism's heyday, 'Scène des massacres de Scio'. The Scio ostensibly depicts an episodic aftermath of violent events from the Greek War of Independence (1821-32) but its slumped figures and subdued atmosphere do nothing to earn this description. Its defining characteristic - figures that appear simultaneously overwrought and utterly listless - remains unexplained by the attention to political contexts, gender roles, or other concerns that have articulated the reception of Delacroix. Margaret MacNamidhe brilliantly argues that the Scio represents an effort to furnish new models in a tradition that had become increasingly problematic. The painting's mass of bodies arguably defines Delacroix's contribution to French painting: his ebbing interest in depicting a purposeful, singular subjectivity, his increasing concentration on groups simultaneously trapped by and released from the most anguished of circumstances.