Paris_ The Collected Traveler - Barrie Kerper [155]
EVEN THE MOST devoted art connoisseurs can find the Grand Louvre and its ilk just that: big, not to say exhausting. Paris’s small museums—often devoted to the works of a single artist—come as a welcome antidote, offering a keyhole view of creators and their creations.
For me, none is more evocative than the Musée National Eugène Delacroix, tucked in the square on the leafy rue de Furstenberg, a backwater of the sixth arrondissement north of the Église Saint-Germain. Visitors quickly recognize it as the location chosen by director Martin Scorsese for the final, bittersweet scene in The Age of Innocence.
The setting admirably suited Eugène Delacroix, that prolific Romantic giant of mid-nineteenth-century painting, whom Théophile Gautier lauded as a fiery, savage, passionate artist who “depicted the anxieties and aspirations of our period.” Delacroix lived the last five years of his life behind the green gates in the northwest corner of the square.
Delacroix’s color merchant, Étienne-François Haro, had in 1857 located the apartment, with its parade of six rooms caught between an eighteenth-century inner courtyard and a pretty back garden shaded by a chestnut tree. The land had once belonged to the nearby abbey church. It provided a “hermitage” of monastic quiet yet was only a few blocks from the work that had episodically absorbed much of the painter’s creative energy since 1849: the Chapelle des Saints-Anges at the Église Saint-Sulpice. At the side of the garden the landlord had built a pretty studio with a north-facing skylight and lofty walls to the artist’s specifications.
When he moved from the Right Bank into his new abode after Christmas 1857, the ailing fifty-nine-year-old painter found it “decidedly charming,” writing in his Journal that “the view of my small garden and the cheerful appearance of my studio inspire elation.”
The forty thousand annual visitors to the recently spruced-up museum share that response. Although not very many of the furnishings were Delacroix’s own, his spirit pervades the peaceful, domestic-scale rooms. Drawings, small oil sketches—mostly on loan from the Louvre—and holograph letters line the walls and vitrines of the square sage green salon and the adjacent library and bedroom, illustrating the threads of his life: his friendships with George Sand and Gautier; his fashionable philhellenism; and his taste for Shakespeare, Byron, and Sir Walter Scott. His self-portrait in the guise of Ravenswood, hero of The Bride of Lammermoor, exemplifies Romanticism as well as any other image, revealing the twinkling eyes that Odilon Redon claimed “seemed to outshine chandeliers.”
The library’s four hundred volumes were dispersed. Delacroix’s delightful Journal—chockablock with thoughtful musings and extracts from his interests—demonstrates the breadth of his interests and literary gifts that rival his painterly talents. He was an enormously likable man: acute, analytical, affectionate, handsome, wry, courageous, intense, and loyal.
The airy garden studio, with its tall easel and his palettes and paint tables alongside bowls and leather goods he brought back from Morocco, Algeria, and Spain, inspires fantasies. Delacroix had been the rallying point for an art more passionate than David’s and Ingres’s neoclassicism. He exalted imagination. The classical, literary, and biblical vocabulary of his works is today less familiar to many of us and the colors in which he gloried have often proved unstable, yet the sweep and gusto that caused him to break with the era’s prevailing academic canon leave us captivated.
Later in his life, a self-appointed cerberus—a sensible Breton named Jenny Le Guillou—dominated Delacroix’s domestic life. Her portrait, painted shortly after she became his housekeeper in the mid-1830s, today hangs in the bedroom, looking out with keen, thoughtful eyes. At once mother and confidante, Jenny was devoted to his genius, massaging his confidence and providing an unruffled influence, a contrast to the erratic