EUGÈNE DELACROIX (1798-1863)
Monte Perdido / Mont Perdu (3,355 m -11,007ft)
Spain
Spain
In Album Pyrénées 1845, watercolor, Musée du Louvre, Paris
Monte Perdido (3,355 m -11,007ft), Mont Perdu in French, located in Spain, near the French-Spanish border, is the highest summit above sea level on the ridge separating the canyons of Ordesa and Pineta in the Pyrénées. This is the central peak of Tres Hermanas (Spanish) consist of the cylinder Marboré, the Soum de Ramond, and Monte Perdido itself.
Observable from the peaks popular at the time (including the Pic du Midi de Bigorre), Mount Perdido is no longer visible from the French valleys, as located behind the watershed line between France and Spain.
The limestone, rich in fossils are marine sedimentary origin. These sediments occupying a shallow sea were raised during the formation of the Pyrenees there are 40 million years (see article Geology of the Pyrénées).The summit a form of typical pyramidal peak of erosion by glaciers time of glaciation, he is still on the northeast side of the mountain the Monte Perdido glacier.
Ramond Carbonnières, is the firstpersonn to have discover Mount Perdu. Since his first stay in Barèges, in 1787, he was fascinated by the "massive limestone" of Marboré. In 1796, convinced that the nature of the limestone Marboré is "ordinary" Ramond determines an access route to the summit: the Estaubé Valley.
The painter
Ferdinand Victor Eugène Delacroix was a French Romantic artist regarded from the outset of his career as the leader of the French Romantic school. As a painter and muralist, Delacroix's use of expressive brushstrokes and his study of the optical effects of colour profoundly shaped the work of the Impressionists, while his passion for the exotic inspired the artists of the Symbolist movement. A fine lithographer, Delacroix illustrated various works of William Shakespeare, the Scottish author Walter Scott and the German author Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.
In contrast to the Neoclassical perfectionism of his chief rival Ingres, Delacroix took for his inspiration the art of Rubens and painters of the Venetian Renaissance, with an attendant emphasis on colour and movement rather than clarity of outline and carefully modeled form. Dramatic and romantic content characterized the central themes of his maturity, and led him not to the classical models of Greek and Roman art, but to travel in North Africa, in search of the exotic. Friend and spiritual heir to Théodore Géricault, Delacroix was also inspired by Lord Byron, with whom he shared a strong identification with the "forces of the sublime", of nature in often violent action.
However, Delacroix was given to neither sentimentality nor bombast, and his Romanticism was that of an individualist. In the words of Baudelaire, "Delacroix was passionately in love with passion, but coldly determined to express passion as clearly as possible."
In 1832, Delacroix traveled to Spain and North Africa, as part of a diplomatic mission to Morocco shortly after the French conquered Algeria. He went not primarily to study art, but to escape from the civilization of Paris, in hopes of seeing a more primitive culture. He eventually produced over 100 paintings and drawings of scenes from or based on the life of the people of North Africa, and added a new and personal chapter to the interest in Orientalism. Delacroix was entranced by the people and the costumes, and the trip would inform the subject matter of a great many of his future paintings. He believed that the North Africans, in their attire and their attitudes, provided a visual equivalent to the people of Classical Rome and Greece: "The Greeks and Romans are here at my door, in the Arabs who wrap themselves in a white blanket and look like Cato or Brutus…"
He managed to sketch some women secretly in Algiers, as in the painting Women of Algiers in their Apartment (1834), but generally he encountered difficulty in finding Muslim women to pose for him because of Muslim rules requiring that women be covered. Less problematic was the painting of Jewish women in North Africa, as subjects for the Jewish Wedding in Morocco (1837–41).
While in Tangier, Delacroix made many sketches of the people and the city (see painting above), subjects to which he would return until the end of his life. Animals—the embodiment of romantic passion—were incorporated into paintings such as Arab Horses Fighting in a Stable (1860), The Lion Hunt (of which there exist many versions, painted between 1856 and 1861), and Arab Saddling his Horse (1855).
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2019 - Wandering Vertexes...
by Francis Rousseau
