Original subtitles

Using Delacua is one of the great romantic painters, an artist who wrestled with the Revolutionary

Politics of 19th Century France, who added an exotic oriental dimension to European art.

And it inspired a late flourishing history painting, whilst playing a major role in the development of modern art.

Eugene Delacua was born on the 26th of April 1798 just outside Paris.

His father, Charles, was a lawyer and a politician, and his mother came from an illustrious family of cabinet makers.

But there's a certain mystery surrounding his birth, because a rumor flew around that, in fact, his real father,

was the celebrated politician and statesman Maurice Talleron, although nothing was ever proved.

When Delacua was just seven, Charles, his father died.

He left a considerable sum of money to his wife, but through financial mismanagement,

she left her family with almost nothing on her death nine years later.

Eugene, now an orphan, moved in with his elder sister and her husband.

Despite the setbacks, Delacua managed to get into a good school in Paris, where he won prizes for classics,

and for drawing, enabling him to enter the prestigious echo their bows are,

and to study the work of the old masters at first hand, just over the river in the Louvre.

In the 19th century, the Salam was the place where every artist wanted to exhibit his, or occasionally her work.

The selection jury there could make or break careers, but success led to public and private commissions.

The Salam was held every two years, up to 1833, from then on, though, it was an annual event.

In the summer of 1821, Delacua decided he was ready for the Salam, and he began work on a picture, which was accepted by the jury, the following April.

It's called the bark of Dante, and he's taken from the great poem by the late medieval Florentine poet Dante,

who has this poetic journey from hell through poetry to paradise.

And what Delacua takes is hell and the inferno.

The bark is the small boat in which Dante himself is cited, clad here in red,

with an amazing expression of surprise and terror on his face.

And next to him is his accompanist, the great Roman poet Virgil, who has this serene expression on his face with a laurel leaf on his head,

and the next of them with his back turn to us is the boat keeper from the river Styx, Flagees,

who is struggling to get through this lake that surrounds the infernal city of dis.

And all around, the damned are trying desperately to be saved and to get aboard the boat.

The inspiration for the work, Dante, was oddly enough rare in French art,

even though Dante had fueled Italian art for the previous five centuries,

no major French Salam painter had ever attempted this subject matter,

but of course the real inspiration for this subject is clear.

It's Jericho's raft of the Medusa, and the drama and the lighting,

and the subject master of figures struggling to get on board of boats,

but I think what also struck the contemporary iron certainly what strikes us looking at the work

is the detailing, not just the expressions, but look at the way that colours used.

Now, Delacqua becomes one of the great colourists in Western art, but here it's very subtle,

particularly in the way that the droplets of water are painted,

where instead of using the usual graze, he uses a mixture of red and green and yellow and white,

what he says is the pallet of creation, the rainbow, rather than the muted colours that have usually been used.

And this work was acquired by the French State,

and the reaction critically was one of astonishment rather than admiration.

But nonetheless, the feeling was there that here was the next young talent in French art.

Shortly after completing the bark of Dante, Delacqua began to keep a journal,

leaving us an extensive and fascinating insight into the workings of the artist's mind.

I am carrying out my plan formulated so many times of writing a journal,

the right has to say almost everything in order to make himself understood.

But in painting, it is if some mysterious bridge was set up between the spirit of the persons in the picture and the beholder.

We ought to steep ourselves from time to time in great and beautiful works of art.

Delacqua now organised all his attempts to make great and beautiful works of art, with the salar in mind.

The next one was scheduled for 1824.

And this was the work that Delacqua exhibited.

Larger, bolder, brassier than the bark of Dante, and in title, scenes from the massacres at Chios.

A Chios was a Greek island that had recently been attacked by the Turks after the Greeks have proclaimed independence in 1822.

And what had happened was that 90,000 inhabitants on this island have been subjected to over two months

of burning, pillaging, looting and raping to the extent that there were less than a thousand left

the rest have been killed or deported for slavery.

And Delacqua had both read contemporary newspaper accounts and also interviewed eyewitnesses.

But in the end, that was a springboard for his imagination.

The paintings dominated by the figures in the foreground, who were all the Greeks who were awaiting death or slavery.

They all seemed to be paired up from the woman crying leaning on the shoulder of the man who's been injured

to perhaps the most touching scene.

The young child searching for his mother's nipple for nourishment while his mother lies dead.

Again, one of the noticeable things about the painting is this detail and colour.

Not least, in the red around the old woman's eyes, flecked with green, it's complementary.

And then look at the shadow on our arm, red once again, but again flecked with green.

But then there's the drama, the drama of the Turk on horseback, dragging off this woman who's clothes are falling from her,

as a young Greek man tries to protect her.

And then we move to the middle ground, where there's another massacre taking place,

where the Turks are there with guns and swords, killing a group of Greeks.

And then in the shadows, we notice the specter of the Turkish guards holding their guns.

And so what we have is a scene of individual episodes brought into one,

where, ultimately, everything seems utterly chaotic.

And the critical reaction to the work was, on one hand, people said this was the new wild man of French art,

and others said Delacua has massacred painting.

And this work helped to polarise the situation in France

that became a battle if you like between classicism,

and the art that have been put forward by people like David, idealness, beauty, order, harmony,

and its antithesis, romanticism, the subversion of classicism, naturalism, emotion,

the idea of sketchiness and speed and intensity, and all of those things Delacua stood for.

The massacre of Gios was bought by the French state for 6,000 francs,

which Delacua used to fund a trip to London.

This three month journey was highly significant.

Young artists tended to opt for the classical splendors of Italy,

but Delacua made it clear that his interest was in contemporary art,

and in particular, the emerging British school, notably Constable and Bonnington.

This art, he saw as a breath of fresh air in comparison to the rigidity of French painting,

but it was in this literature which partly inspired his next major work.

In 1828, Delacua was back in the salon to produce what turns out to be the third of the great three early works,

and an image that he called his massacre number two,

and a painting that is still the most radical work he ever painted,

and it's called the death of Sardinapolis.

Sardinapolis was the Assyrian king who lived in the Palace of Nineveh,

in the 9th century before the birth of Christ.

But the precedence for the painting for Delacua was a play written by Lord Byron in 1821,

and subsequently performed in Paris.

In Byron's play, Sardinapolis kills himself along with one concubine,

because the rebels are at the door of his palace of Nineveh.

But in Delacua's painting, the king lies almost languidly,

like some reclining Venus on this giant, billowing pink bed,

with a concubine next to him pleading with him that a life isn't taken,

but all around him, people are being killed by his unix and by the palace guards,

there's a potion of poison being brought.

And in the top right-hand corner, we can see the billowing flames just beginning,

as if to tell us that shortly everything will go up in smoke.

And it's almost like an image of a latter-day cult,

where everyone is condemned to die,

but at the centre of it all,

is this kind of mystical, enigmatic, cultish leader.

For many people, this painting remains that the apex of romantic art,

brilliant colours, dynamic brush strokes,

and dynamic composition where the eye is always drawn over the painting.

And Delacua himself said,

I really hate organising my disorganised mind,

has a void, this dark void he talks about that needs to be filled,

and in a way, that's what's going on here.

And the subject matter is extreme too.

Suicide was favored by romantic artists and writers like Gerter,

but here, by expanding it into a mass suicide,

Delacua was deemed to have pushed his art off the edge.

And that sadly was the broad consensus amongst both critics and the public,

that this was almost a delirious image.

And this time, the state didn't buy the painting,

but it remained among Delacua's favourite works,

and it still strikes a chord.

It still has this sense of energy and some version.

It's a total subversion, and everything that classical art and order stood for.

In 1822, when Delacua had first shown the salon with the bark of Dante,

he was an unknown artist.

Now, just eight years later, though,

he was at the very heart of the French artistic establishment.

But Paris was soon to become embroiled,

in political and military turmoil, which in turn led to Delacua's most famous painting.

Delacua lived in turbulent revolutionary times,

and it was this energy and excitement that fueled the best of his painting.

When Delacua was born, Napoleon Bonaparte had seized power,

proclaimed himself Emperor, and ruled over France, and much of Europe,

for the next decade and a half, only being defeated in the end by the Duke of Wellington,

at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815.

Though then followed, the restoration of the Bourbon Monarchy,

who, at least ostensibly understood that there was no going back

to the pretensions of the Antoine regime.

Nonetheless, they did try and establish a regressive, repressive Catholic Monarchy,

which, in effect, was turning the clock back.

And on the 25th of July, 1830,

the repressive King Charles X, abolished the freedom of the press,

dissolved the Chamber of Deputies,

and altered the election laws.

And in turn, the people of Paris rose up in Revolution,

which gave Delacua the subject for his most iconic large-scale work.

And this is Delacua's pictorial response to the July Revolution,

a painting called Liberty Leading the People,

painted between October and December in a rush of creative energy by Delacua,

who tries to combine fact and fiction to affirm that he was there

by showing his signature on a piece of gnarled wood in the right hand side of the painting.

And also, as he says, I didn't fight, but at least I can paint for the country.

But look at the composition and you realise that this is a very carefully constructed

and quite ordered painting by Delacua standards.

At the pinnacle of this pyramid is the figure of liberty.

A combination of a working-class girl and some kind of classical statue

with her breast revealed rather tokenistically,

but I suppose to show that she can also be mother of the people,

a kind of nourishing figure.

And then down below her, there are various carefully observed types of working-class figures.

On the left-hand side, clutching a sabre, there's a factory worker.

Then in a top hat holding a gun, slightly up the social scale, is an artisan.

And then kneeling at the feet of liberty is a country laborer.

On the right-hand side, the young boy clutching two pistols,

and then to the right of the boy, clearly visible,

and makes the billowing clouds of smoke.

You can see Notre Dame, as if to affirm that this is contemporary Paris.

Even though this would not have been possible to see in quite this way,

but nevertheless Delacua wants to say, this is my world.

But of course, at the apex of the composition,

is the flag, is the trickula.

And if you look at the colour throughout the painting, which is muted by the standards of Delacua's previous art,

there's this very subtle build-up of red, white and blue,

found throughout the work, but there proclaimed is the pinnacle.

And there is something very ordered and almost classical about this work.

It's as if Delacua has stepped back from the extreme edges of romanticism

to something relatively more controlled.

It's also a picture that struck a huge chord,

both with critics and public alike,

when it was exhibited in the 1831 Salon.

And as the consequence of this work, Delacua received the legion-donner.

Now, it's become an icon of the French Republic.

Delacua's official status was further enhanced in 1832,

when he was invited to go to Morocco as part of an official delegation

to see the Sultan.

France had recently conquered Algeria,

and was very keen, both to a lay, Moroccan fears,

and also to re-establish a new relationship between the two countries.

And for Delacua, the journey would shape the course of his art, for the rest of his life.

Once here in Morocco, the exotic orient that had only existed in Delacua's imagination,

suddenly started to seem real, and his world was filled with new sensations,

smells, sounds, and of course, a new vision.

Each part of the six-month trip was documented through Delacua's journals,

and his letters, and most significantly his sketchbooks.

The majority of his time was spent in Tangiers,

immersing himself in a culture that was largely unfamiliar,

but which through Delacua's images became a mecca for Western artists

over the next few decades.

Whilst in Tangiers, he was invited to a Jewish wedding,

which he subsequently painted.

He shows the contrast of light streaming into the courtyard,

with the dark shadows and either side.

The Jews are on the left with the woman dancing,

and then the more was on the right, all observed from above,

from beyond the balustrade,

and then, of course, from down below, by implication, by the painter.

After six weeks in Tangiers,

the entourage were given orders to travel to the Imperial City of Meccanets,

for an audience with the Sultan.

Finally, after a week of waiting,

a crowd gathered here,

who was standing there as musicians and cavalrymen,

and people just looking at what was about to happen,

and then the Sultan appeared at the Babel Mansour,

the gateway to the Imperial City.

It was an event which burned itself into Delacua's imagination,

and inspired this canvas some 13 years later.

Delacua stayed in Morocco for another three months,

leaving for France on the 10th of June,

and going by Algiers and Spain on the way home.

The trip filled these sketchbooks and his imagination,

and it equipped him for a full glow and seductive assault

on the Parisian art world.

Back in France, Delacua completed,

and then exhibited perhaps his greatest and certainly most accomplished painting

from the Moroccan journey.

It's called the Women of Algiers in their apartment,

and it was shown at the salon in 1834.

On one level, this painting reaches new heights of naturalism,

as a kind of documentary realism about the work,

that stems from the fact, as we know,

that Delacua made sketches in an actual hiring in Algiers,

from which much of the work is based,

but we also know too that it's still rooted in that slightly exotic,

other kind of fantasy,

that dominates the West in imagination.

The work can also be read in the context of France's colonisation of Algeria.

Harim or Haram means sacred, and in a way, by depicting this scene,

Delacua is making that space seem less sacred, less mysterious.

However, what he's doing in this work is also showing,

or trying to show the Harim, as it actually was,

and not as some kind of caricature of Western sexual fantasy.

For a start, the women are clothed as plenty of limbs around,

but they're not sprawling naked,

and therefore explicitly sexualised.

They seem ultimately in control.

They seem remote, and self-contained.

And although the painting's intimate,

in the way that the detail of the still life, the slippers, the cushions, the rugs,

the pipe, is painted in the foreground,

the women, also act as a kind of veil or a screen,

to what lies behind, which is in turn revealed by the black servant,

who's pulling the curtain away to reveal something of the inner mystery,

of the Harim, with the door open,

but we only get a flickering, fleeting glimpse.

And ultimately, it seems a painting of mood,

is that language sensual later afternoon,

where the shadows are falling, creeping in from the left,

and where colour, as always in Deliqua, has this amazing sense of control,

but also of procession.

And this is a painting that when the critics saw it in the 1834 cello,

left them to a certain extent non-plus,

people said nothing is happening here,

because it was on such a large scale,

they expected something of the drama of Deliqua's previous history paintings.

But in a way, what he's done here is much more subtle.

It has this much more subtle, hedonistic atmosphere to it,

and it's this painting, perhaps above all others,

that it's struck a chord with painters of future generations.

Matisse adored this painting,

and was partly driven to go to Morocco as a consequence of it.

Picasso did variations on it.

The Spanish filmmaker Lewis Bernwell said he could almost smell the incense in the picture,

and perhaps most memorably, Paul Suzanne said,

looking at this picture,

it enters your eye in the way that a glass of wine slips down the throat,

and in the end leaves you feeling intoxicated.

Soon after Deliqua's return from Morocco,

he was given the first of a series of commissions

for decorative projects in public and private buildings around Paris.

The first was for the Palais Bourbon,

or the National Assembly as it's now known.

Here in the Salon du Wa, initially built as a throne room,

Deliqua painted a freeze running around the top of the room,

punctuated by windowaches, filled with allegorical figures,

highlighting the key aspects of a successful state,

justice, commerce, industry, agriculture, and war,

all supported by eight large columns or pears,

on which Deliqua painted allegorical figures,

representing the main rivers of France and the surrounding oceans.

Such was the success of the Salon du Wa,

that Deliqua was then asked to decorate the Bourbon Palace's library.

For eight years, struggling with ill health,

he painted two half domes and five large bays,

a vast pictorial saga of the rise and fall of classical civilisation and learning.

At one end, the lyric poet obvious brings enlightenment

to the early Greeks, whilst at the other,

a tiller the harness hordes over runitally and the arts.

In between, the bays are filled with ancient classical and biblical stories,

which Deliqua believed to embody the main subjects of any library,

history, philosophy, poetry, science, eloquence, law, and theology.

And then, in 1854, Deliqua finally began to work

on an illustrious commission he'd actually received five years earlier,

to paint three murals for the Church of Sunsel peace.

In the small chapel de Santage,

lit only from a stained glass window,

Deliqua painted three works that emphasised the struggle between good and evil.

Here, Jacob wrestles with the angel.

The Emperor Heliodaurus is driven from the temple

whose treasures he was trying to seize.

And finally, the archangel Michael defeats the devil

and proclaims the triumph of God.

While Deliqua was working on the Sunsel peace murals,

he became involved in a project in 1855

by the French government to respond to the great exhibition

that had taken place in London for years earlier.

The new imperial regime of Louis Napoleon wanted to assert

French superiority in commerce and the arts,

and in order to do this, he staged an exposition

on a universal in which there were pavilions of work

by living artists from each country.

And Deliqua was given pride of place

with his first major retrospective exhibition,

as well as being made a member of the French Academy.

Late recognition for an artist who'd played the Salon system so effectively,

but whose impact transcended it.

For Deliqua offered an expansive, highly original,

an often exotic vision, which over the ensuing decades,

was to inspire artists and filmmakers from Manetal Louis Brunwell.

Deliqua never stopped painting until his strength finally deserted him.

Art was an all-consuming affair for him.

He never married because as he put it,

he needed nothing else in his life apart from painting.

But in the winter of 1862, he called a cold

and then contracted a severe virus.

And although he was looked after by his trusty-made Jenny,

he died on the 13th of August 1862.

Having supposedly uttered his last words,

I had enough of my head for another 40 years.