Eugene Delacroix: His Life and Work

CROWN, $5.00

IF Joseph M. Bernstein’s translation of this essay by Baudelaire had been accompanied by an introduction, it might have been said there that the book observes the centennial of the completion of Delacroix’s major work, the murals in the library of the French Chamber of Deputies, executed in the style which Delacroix, after Géricault, so largely created. It might have explained that the glorious drawings which appear on the recto of every leaf of the book were once the subject of insult and derision (“You ought to pay more attention to drawing, M. Delacroix,” scolded Ingres). And if there had been an appendix, which the book unforgivably lacks, the reader might have had some clue to the size, date, and whereabouts of the drawings.

If there is occasion to wonder why drawings should have been chosen to represent a Romantic painter, the inventor of a new color language and author of some of the lushest pictures in the wide world, the jacket might have explained — as the text does not, for it is nearly all about painting — that Baudelaire ranked Delacroix as a draughtsman along with Ingres and Daumier.

Baudelaire’s text is a ringing defense, composed just after Delacroix’s death in 1863, of a man whose influence upon the next generation was much deeper than that of his rivals: his decomposition of color gave birth to the new impressionist school. Except for some of the pen and ink sketches, which come off rather spottily, the drawings look well here on watermarked paper which simulates the texture of drawing material.

MACKINLEY HRLM