Patrick Noon

The thing about Delacroix’s compositions are I mean, he has a way of creating these explosive energized compositions of figures, movement, in ways that are completely balanced and actually pure genius. And even his severest critics would say for all of his bad drawing and all of his inaccurate anatomical representation and all of his figures that look like they’re rubber bands and it can’t stand up, for all of that he is brilliant at creating this kind of intense movement within a composition in that it’s that intense movement of course which is so expressive and expresses the nature of the subject and also his own inner inspiration.

The manner in which he executes a picture allows him to do that, because he is not doing it piecemeal, you know paint a head here, paint a foot there but he is going from one part of the canvas to the other at the same time; he is working the whole surface at once which is why his pictures look so rapidly drawn and quickly brushed, because he is, he is moving across the whole surface, which is what the Impressionist will do too because that’s the aim of their approach, and Delacroix is of course the bridge.