Transcript

Melissa Berry

Although Delacroix continued to hold on to the values and fantasies of Romanticism, this didn’t prevent his work being a major force for change.

Professor William Vaughan

Delacroix has a great influence on painters on the later 19th Century. The impressionists in particular in their new way of discovering colour effect. And perhaps inparticular, Cezanne who we now see as one of the most important, if the not the most important painter of the later 19th Century.

Stephen Cornicard

We are all there in this Delacroix. When I speak of the joy of colour for colour's sake, this is what I mean... These pale pinks, these stuffy cushions, this slipper, all this limpidity, I don't know how, it enters your eye like a glass of wine going down your throat, and you are immediately intoxicated. One doesn't know how but one feels lighter. He knows how to differentiate - a silk is a fabric, a face is flesh. The same sun, the same emotion caresses them, but differently.

And it is in his colours that he knows it and does it. He makes contrast. All these peppery nuances, look, with all their violence, the clear harmony that they give.

Professor William Vaughan

By that I think he meant the effects of colour that Delacroix had discovered the ways in which harmonies could be created out of colour, but also the way they affected the sense of textures in pictures. The way all the neuences of atmospherics could be created. I find it very difficult to know whether he would have developed quite int he way he did if he hadn't been to Morocco. I myself feel that probably the most important aspect of Morocco for him, was simply the effect of light the power of light. He did find something there that he hadn't seen before shall we say and was critical for him.

Stephen Cornicard

In this short time, I have lived 20 times more intensely than in several months in Paris. If you ever have a few months to spare, come to Barbary and there you will see those natural qualities that are always disguised in our countries, and you’ll feel…the rare and precious influence of the sun, which gives an intense life to everything.