Questions on the Beautiful

If one painter could replace another in the popular imagination, for the sake of the arts and for society it should be a Frenchman for a Hollander, both of the nineteenth century—Eugène Delacroix for Vincent van Gogh. In Delacroix (1798–1863) we have an artist who saw humanity in the uncompromising light of our immutable dual character, part animal, part divine. Civilization, Delacroix knew, was not a given, never guaranteed, and as both history and the newspapers showed then and still show, threats to civilization come not only from without. Delacroix refused to leave the eternally relevant subject of tyranny to political actors and historians, and so his paintings encompassed scenes from the present day and distant past, from North Africa and the Near East, from literature and myth.