Pain that Divides and Gathers: Delacroix’s Romanticism

Speaker: Margaret MacNamidhe
Discussant: Bina S. Ellias

November 6, 2003 | 6.30 pm
Little Theatre, National Centre for the Performing Arts, Mumbai

Margaret MacNamidhe is a Visiting Lecturer in the Department of the History of Art, University College, Dublin. She graduated from the Johns Hopkins University in 2002 with a dissertation entitled ‘The Dilemma of Painting in the 1824 Salon: A New Interpretation of Eugène Delacroix’s Career’. Her undergraduate training was as a painter. After graduating from the National College of Art and Design in Dublin with a degree in Fine Art and Art History, she spent the next four years painting full-time, including scholarships in Italy, Scandinavia and Greece, and exhibiting widely in Ireland and Europe.

Eugène Delacroix’s painting Scenes from the Massacres at Chios was his major entry for the Paris Salon of 1824 where it met with consternation and bafflement. In this lecture, the speaker will examine why contemporary viewers found the painting with its mass of slumped and suffering figures so difficult but compelling to look at. Whether supportive or furious, critics in the newspapers and journals of the time lingered over the painting-variously shoring it up with explanatory narratives or sifting its disorder. They found that the Chios took a long time to look at. This, the speaker believes, is key to the constitutive nature of the painting: it demands time to see the Chios, it cannot be perceived ‘whole’, it has to be viewed figure by figure, area by area. This is, above all, a matter of the ways in which it is painted. It is this that sets it apart from the painting that came before in the French tradition. Delacroix’s approach is fundamentally unlike the unities of gesture and purpose that course though Jacques-Louis David’s Oath of the Horatii (1785) and also Théodore Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa (1819), a painting to which the Chios has however, frequently been compared.