Paintings Drawings Sculptures 2016 - Jean Luc Baroni

7. Eugène Delacroix, Self-portrait, Musée du Louvre, Paris.
Interesting additional evidence has recently come to
light regarding the provenance first recorded by the
Duc de Trévise, on information presumably provided
by the Mandat-Grancey family. Michèle Hannoosh,
editor of the new edition of Delacroix’s journals
(published in 2009) gives the record: Colin, Julie.
Bonne de Delacroix... and recounts the story as told
by Léon Riesener, Delacroix’s cousin, that Jenny,
well-known as Delacroix’s servant up until the time
of his death, had engineered the departure of her
predecessor Julie, although Delacroix himself briefly
re-instated her 16 . The comings and goings of Julie and
the distress of Jenny are recorded in Delacroix’s own
journal entry of 14 April 1854 and in a note written
on a sketch: Le jour où Julie est revenue. 22 Avril
54. Samedi’. It is also known that Delacroix left the
considerable sum of 10,000 francs to Julie in his will 17 .
Intriguingly, Géricault also appears to have had a Julie
in his household: la curieuse Julie, mentioned in a
letter of 1822/3 18 .
The period 1817-1819 follows on from Géricault’s
somewhat precipitate return from Rome. Heading north,
he passed through Siena and briefly met up with his
greatest friend Dedreux-Dorcy before reaching Paris in
the autumn of 1817. Countless sketches, drawings and
a smaller number of finely worked gouaches testify to
his activity during this period and his fascination with
what he saw in Rome but Géricault was there for less
than a year and returned having apparently suffered
extremes of loneliness and depression. He moved back
into his father’s house on the then outskirts of Paris,
in the rue des Martyrs at the foot of Montmartre. This
semi-rural bohemian area was known as La Nouvelle
Athènes; the rue des Martyrs ran like a village street
up towards the hill between gardens and scattered
houses. Almost next door to the studio of Horace
Vernet and surrounded by painters, sculptors, writers
and Bonapartists, Géricault fell back into a hot-house
of artistic and political ferment. He also resumed the
love-story (which he had partly gone to Italy to escape)
with Alexandrine-Modeste de Saint Martin (his aunt by
marriage) and in 1818 she bore his child. Géricault
spent three years in Paris before leaving for England. In
this short period of great personal drama, having spent
time painting academy studies (as he did in the studio
of Guérin) and re-located to a much larger studio, he
created the masterpiece of his career, The Raft of the
Medusa which was exhibited at the Salon of 1819. He
also produced a series of magnificent drawings and
easel paintings. In Italy Géricault had absorbed the
lessons of Classical Rome and of Michelangelo and
back in Paris he turned to the world around him, to
contemporary events, both political and literary, but
also more specifically to the people before his eyes.
As Bazin writes: It is at this moment that he turned
himself into a portraitist, painting sitters from the studio
or amongst his circle 19 . Bazin goes on to explain that
most plausibly Géricault must have given the portraits
he made to their models, which would explain why
they only feature in his posthumous sale in an episodic
manner 20 . It can clearly be presumed that this was the
8. Eugène Delacroix, Self-portrait (detail), Musée des Beaux-
Arts, Rouen.
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