On September 3, 1822, Eugene Delacroix penned the first entry in his journal, "I am carrying out my plan, so often formulated, of keeping a journal. What I most keenly wish is not to forget that I'm writing for myself alone. Thus, I shall always tell the truth, I hope, and thus I shall improve myself."
Delacroix, rumored to be the illegitimate son of Talleyrand, was a leader of the Romantic school. Writing in fluent script in notebooks and on scraps of paper, he recorded inner struggles and his analyses of earlier creators from Michelangelo to Shakespeare, as well as his contemporaries Balzac, Gèricault and George Sand. Delacroix also jotted down lists of pigments, the amount of money paid out to models, accounts of dinner parties and concerts and allusions ot his failing health. The Journal has been called "a unique monument in the history of art." Walter Pach wrote that it "gives us perhaps the most complete record we have of any artist's life." Claude Monet considered it his favorite book.
"The eyes of many people are dull or false," Delacroix wrote in the last entry. "They see objects literally, of the exquisite they see nothing."
The diaries were not publised until thirty years after the painter's death. They had passed from the hands of his housekeeper to one friend and then another. Some of the original entries were lost, but fortunately copies had been made. Even in the 1890s, after the journal was published, pages torn from the notebooks surfaced in bookshops on the rue de Seine where they could be purchased for a few francs.
|
