The Cambridge Companion to Delacroix (review)

Wright, Beth S., ed. The Cambridge Companion to Delacroix. New York: Cambridge UP, 2001. Pp. 240. ISBN 0-521-65077-1 (cloth) ISBN 0-521-65889-6 (paper)

For more than a decade the Cambridge UP has provided "companions" to the study of cultural icons from Shakespeare to Keats to Berlioz but has left visual artists alone. Now in this early year of the new millennium, not only does Cambridge introduce a series to accompany the consideration of individual visual artists, beginning with Delacroix, but Oxford UP initiates a project of similar name with Turner as its first subject. The resemblance between the two series appears to end with the term "companion." Their approaches and what they offer the curious or needy scholar are quite different.

The contrast between the two volumes helps define the basic project of the Cambridge series. The Oxford Turner is the literal heavy weight, 420 pages with 53 contributors and nearly 800 learned entries. One can look up an English site to see if Turner painted it, how many times he tackled it and where those paintings are. A marvelous encyclopedia, although hardly a book for the briefcase.

The modest 240 pages of the Cambridge presentation are devoted to nine topical essays and an introduction. Along with the requisite notes and bibliography, there is a helpful set of chronological tables. Use of the excellent index could help one answer some of those what, where, when questions about the artist and his works, but the emphasis of the volume is on the presentation of a variety of scholarly perspectives. This means that the same painting may be used by two or three or more authors in quite different ways within their individual essays. Nina Athanassoglou-Kallmyer uses "The Interior of a Dominican Convent in Madrid," a painting inspired by a tale in "Melmoth the Wanderer," to discuss Delacroix's interest in the gothic tales of popular fiction. Paul Joannides, looking at "Delacroix and Modern Literature," links the same painting, through both its compositional format and its type of subject, to Delacroix's treatment of several subjects drawn from Byron. To him the com-positions reflect " the individual ruined by the state or institution, whose inexorable power is symbolized by oppressive architecture - an issue not without echoes in Delacroix's own career and in that of the patron of both the Dominican Convent and the Prisoner of Chillon, the young duc d'Orleans" (134). An individual essay in Wright's compendium could satisfy the questions of some particular reader because each essay stands on its own. But the effect of the whole volume is not of an encyclopedia but of transparent layers, overlays which enable the reader to discover relationships.

The range of the essays reflects the breadth of Delacroix's life and career as fully as it also represents current trends in scholarship. Wright is known for her work on the use of story and history by nineteenth-century French painters. Of course subject matter is a major consideration in this volume but with emphases peculiar to each author. Athanassoglou-Kallmyer's concern with the gothic has already been mentioned. While Darcy Grigsby sets the orientalist works for which Delacroix is noted within the context of the painter's sexual preoccupations, he also uses them to consider the painter's reservations about colonialism. Paul Joannides, in looking at "Delacroix and Modern Literature," condenses an enormous amount of research into reflective reasoning on the sources of Delacroix's literary subjects. He not only specifies Delacroix's literary interests but also the way in which the painter developed ancillary subjects, implied but not actually in a particular text, and how he utilized compositional ideas from popular illustration. Petra Chu is interested in Delacroix as an observational painter and the relation between the theories he developed from observation and his practice of painting. The ideas that Delacroix considered in his critical essays are the concern of Michelle Hanoosh who has already published...