Book Description

This volume gathers together all the extant pastels of Eugene Delacroix (1798-1862), the leader of the French Romantic movement in painting, the greatest colorist and the most versatile master of the first half of the nineteenth century. These beautiful pastels, housed in collections from London to Los Angeles to Cairo, are rarely exhibited due to their fragility. Published here as a group for the first time in full color, they provide sheer visual delight as well as enormous insight into Delacroix's endlessly inventive working methods. In his comprehensive introduction, Lee Johnson discusses Delacroix's interest in the medium of pastel and its place in his oeuvre as a whole, from the first reference to the technique in one of his school exercise books through his last known pastel, a finely wrought, signed version of one of his favorite compositions, "The Education of Achilles", which he presented to George Sand in 1862. Professor Johnson then treats the pastels in groups, such as studies for paintings, scenes from literature and mythology, North African scenes, and landscapes, flowers, and sky studies; in each case, he includes a full description and provenance of the work.