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EUGENE DELACROIX French 1798-1863 Gouache on Paper

Currency:USD Category:Antiques Start Price:300.00 USD Estimated At:4,000.00 - 6,000.00 USD
EUGENE DELACROIX French 1798-1863 Gouache on Paper
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Gouache on paper. Featuring a lion. Signed and attr. Eugene Delacroix (French, 1798-1863) on the lower left corner. 20 x 29 cm (7.9 x 11.4 in). Eugene Delacroix was a French painter and leading practitioner of the Romantic movement. Specializing in historic and exotic settings, canvases such as Lion Hunt (1860), show the artist’s emphasis on rich color, dynamic composition, and expressive brushstrokes. Influenced by the fleshy figures of Peter Paul Rubens and the arabesque draftsmanship of Michelangelo, Delacroix’s style was drastically different from his rival the Neoclassicist Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. “Nature is a vast dictionary. Painters who follow their imagination seek in the dictionary the elements that will accommodate their conception,” he once explained. “Those who have no imagination copy the dictionary.” Born on April 26, 1798 in Saint-Maurice-en Chalencon, France, Delacroix received his formal training at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand and at the Lycée Pierre Corneille in Rouen. After settling in Paris, he often made trips to the zoo to sketch animals in motion. A trip to Morocco in 1832, proved a major influence for the rest of his career, as the exotic array of motifs he witnessed never ceased appear in his paintings. Delacroix died on August 13, 1863 in Paris, France His work was championed by the poet Charles Baudelaire and served as a major inspiration to Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Vincent Van Gogh, and Pablo Picasso. In 2018, Delacroix’s painting Tigre jouant avec une tortue (Tiger Playing with a Tortoise) (1862) broke an auction record for the artist when it sold at Christie’s for $9, 875,000. Today, the artist’s works are held in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, the Louvre Museum in Paris, and the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, among others. PROVENANCE: Private American collection