I picked up a copy of Delacroix’s Journal a couple of days ago and started reading it - I’ve read it before, a couple of times, several years ago.

So far, I’ve read maybe 40 pages, if that, mostly the beginning - I have some thoughts about the Journal.

It seems to me that Paris life for an artist in the early 19th century, for Delacroix, was full of sexual encounters with models, some pretty, some not, and the guilt surrounding weather to go with the flow, or to fight it.  There’s also a couple of Mistresses and the pulls and tugs that go with being an artist and being low on money.

But life, on the face of it , sounded not that dissimilar than today - with constant dinner parties, which formed a distraction, at once both welcome and dissipative.

The part I’m reading now covers the period of time when The Massacre at Scio (1824) was painted - and the principles of painting are much the same then as now - if you push something back, what it next to it moves forward and vice versa.  Also “contours” are important in drawing and painting - and those considerations are universal, they exist as much now as they did then.

Interesting that painting is almost as an “idea” that communicates beyond words, and perhaps, beyond awareness.

I guess this is one of getting ready for my Paris Trip soon.  I also ordered The World View of Paul Cezanne - I had one of the original copies of the book but lost it several years ago.  I wondered if I should color my mind with Delacroix and Cezanne writings, ahead of my trip - but decided to do it anyway.

I’ll have more to say about Eugune Delacroix’s Journal later on, as I read more of it.