DELACROIX, ART AND PATRIMONY IN POST-REVOLUTIONARY

This book focuses on Eugene Delacroix’s paintings produced during the Bourbon Restoration. Elizabeth Fraser demonstrates how these works, which include many of his best known paintings, such as The Death of Sardanapalus and Scenes from the Massacre at Chios, commented on contemporary efforts to reconcile the current political situation with the traumatic past of the French Revolution. Analyzing aspects of post-Revolutionary French society, such as social, legal and artistic constructions of inheritance and lineage, Fraser shows how the family served as an important subtext in Delacroix’s art and as a political emblem in the Restoration. She also shows how private art collecting and art criticism served as forms of activist citizenship. Collectively these and other topics demonstrate that Delacroix’s art was as much formed by a monarchical rule, as it was part of the resistance to it.