The last Delacroix exhibition in Britain was held in Glasgow in 1964, so “Delacroix and the Rise of Modern Art,” now at the National Gallery in London, was anticipated with some interest.1 Yet this is a bad exhibition with plenty of good paintings. It topples one revolutionary conceit, that Modern art was invented in 1863 with Manet’s Olympia, and erects another: that Modern art was invented in 1822 with Delacroix’s Barque of the Medusa.
This scenario, like the narrative of the avant-garde that proceeds from it, is both true and false. It is true that Delacroix combined an explosive technique, a scientific palette, and the passions of a reader who took Byron and Walter Scott at their word. It is false to equate Delacroix’s development of pictorial language with a lack of interest in its earlier development. It is true that Delacroix’s painting erupted with a symbolic force akin to that of another idea of the 1820s, Stephenson’s Rocket. It is false to say that Delacroix appeared from nowhere, or that, because the tracks of influence can run only forwards, change is coterminous with progress. Delacroix was a candid admirer of Rubens, as well as of those improbable revolutionaries, Constable and Parkes Bonington.
To remind us which painters must be admired as fearless modernists, and which derided as craven reactionaries, “Delacroix and the Rise of Modern Art” narrates the familiar history of nineteenth-century French painting in a series of pairings. Unfortunately, one half