The Barque of Dante
Eugène Delacroix (1798-1863) · 1822
A small boat is crossing a lake of black water under a sky lit by the flames of a burning city. Standing in the boat, in a red hood, is Dante, and beside him, calm in his brown cloak, the poet Virgil who guides him through hell. The boatman Phlegyas, seen from behind, strains at the oar. Around the hull the damned rise out of the water and claw at the boat: one bites the gunwale, another has seized the side, a woman's white body is flung across the foreground. The scene comes from the eighth canto of Dante's Inferno, the crossing of the marsh of the Styx towards the city of Dis, and the flames on the horizon are its walls.
Look at the drops of water on the bodies of the damned. Delacroix painted each one with separate touches of pure colour, red, yellow, green and white, laid side by side so that they fuse in the eye, a lesson he took from Rubens and from the Venetians. The whole picture is built on the contrast between the sculptural, marble like flesh of the drowning souls and the flickering light of the sky. Dante's raised hand and his open mouth register terror; Virgil's steadying gesture is the only still point in the composition. The signature and the date, eighteen twenty two, are at the top right.
The painting was the first that Delacroix, then twenty four, sent to the Salon, and the state bought it on the sixteenth of July eighteen twenty two for two thousand francs. It hung in the Luxembourg museum, the gallery of living artists, during his lifetime and came to the Louvre in November eighteen seventy four. Critics were divided, but the young politician and writer Adolphe Thiers praised it warmly, and it announced the arrival of a painter who would lead French Romanticism for the next forty years.
Did You Know? Delacroix was only twenty four when this, his first Salon painting, was bought by the state for two thousand francs.
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