Delacroix And The Rise Of Modern Art

Ferdinand Victor Eugène Delacroix, born 10 years after the beginning of the French Revolution, was a phenomenon. Leader of the French Romantic school, his images are vast and passionate, holding back very little – in fact in most cases doing nothing to spare blushes or tender sensitivities. Many have identified his bold work as a precursor to the experimentations of the Impressionists but it is more than clear that his brushstrokes pervaded the minds and influenced the canvases of many artists well into the 20th century.

Of course, the point of the exhibition is to show this artist’s huge influence – a clever PR and marketing strategy for some cynics but a given for those who know. Interspersed among the Delacroix masters you will find anyone from Renoir to Kandinsky, Van Gogh to Metzinger. The hang is comfortable, the variety more than satisfying, but somehow one keeps coming back to the essence of the show itself (despite all the publicity on the hunted lion) to the man himself. His colour palette (to mix metaphorical senses) seems echoed in the splashes of later artists who obviously recognised his attraction to the boldness of controlled hue. But his words of sage advice to painters in 1854? ‘Oh! Young artists. You want a subject? Everything is a subject; the subject is yourself.’

Sharing with Lord Byron a passionate love of expression, his canvases are, when not formal portraiture, like mini cinema ‘cells’, slices of the action, and his handling of colour, whether the most definitive semiduo chrome or almost gaudy multitone, displays a true master’s hand and one more than used to the power of stagey drama. Everyone will be familiar with his 1830 Liberty Leading The People, but there are several treats and surprises in this rich, enticing show full of a delicious vibrancy and power.

Often entranced by the richness and wildness of the Orient and much like many earlier travellers attempting the Grand Tour, Delacroix’s vivacious, magnetic depictions somehow also recall the passionate descriptions of William Beckford’s Vathek. His use of light again is dramatic and strident and his love of Rubens is clear. Dandy poet Baudelaire said of the painter (also known as a dandy), ‘Delacroix was passionately in love with passion, but coldly determined to express passion as clearly as possible.’ A must.

Until 22 May at The National Gallery, Trafalgar Square, London WC2: 0800-912 6958, www.nationalgallery.org.uk