Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863)
Born 1798 CE, died 1863 CE.
Ferdinand Victor Eugène Delacroix ( DEL-ə-krwah, -KRWAH; French: [øʒɛn dəlakʁwa]; 26 April 1798 – 13 August 1863) was a French Romantic artist who was regarded as the leader of the French Romantic school. In contrast to the Neoclassical perfectionism of his chief rival Ingres, Delacroix took for his inspiration the art of Rubens and painters of the Venetian Renaissance, with an attendant emphasis on colour and movement rather than clarity of outline and carefully modelled form. Dramatic and romantic content characterized the central themes of his maturity, and led him not to the classical models of Greek and Roman art, but to travel in North Africa in search of the exotic. Friend and spiritual heir to Théodore Géricault, Delacroix was also inspired by Lord Byron, with whom he shared a strong identification with the "forces of the sublime" of nature in often violent action. However, Delacroix was given to neither sentimentality nor bombast, and his Romanticism was that of an individualist.
Text from the Wikipedia article Eugène_Delacroix, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0.