Delacroix’s last apartment is on a quiet street a short walk from the Luxembourg Gardens in one direction and a short walk to the Louvre in the other. It’s now the Musée National Eugène Delacroix. To get to the Atelier d’Eugène Delacroix you go out the back door to a small grassy courtyard, with hedges, paths, garden, and wrought iron table and chairs. You walk up the steps to the door and enter the separate small building. I look at the apartment building that rises above the courtyard into the drizzle and clouds and wonder about all the people who live in it now. The studio is lit by a huge window that looks out over the garden. It has several paintings, his easel, display cases with brushes, his painting cabinets, and three of his palettes.
When I think of Delacroix asking to see his palette on his deathbed, I don’t think of a great artist reflecting on his career. The little swatches of color organized in three long arcs as if I could add turpentine and start painting even now after 163 years. I think of someone who never lost their sense of wonder. I think of someone who never lost their sense of joy at the most basic elements of, not just their career, but what it is to be human. The basic engagement with color and the ways it can be combined to create other colors and then create pictures, stories for us to see. Delacroix, in his journal, said painting was superior to the other arts because paintings, “even at a distance appeal directly to the most intimate part of the soul, transport one without words to reality by what one may call the music of the picture.”
Words on a page, pigments
Of imagination, conjuring
Spring in the fall
Orange circle of lamplight then
Darkness and a death mask white
Charles Baudelaire said, “I have never seen a palette as precisely and delicately prepared as that of Delacroix. It looked like a bouquet of flowers cunningly arranged.”
