Delacroix
'The tigers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction': said Blake, and he was, as
usual, forestalling that new direction in human feeling which we call Romanticism. Man
in his relationship with animals began to sympathize with the ferocity, the cruelty even,
that he had previously dreaded and opposed. The greatest exponent of this new religion
of violence was Delacroix. He felt a personal sympathy with the pride and aloofness of
the tiger, and realized it in the magnificent early painting in the Louvre of a tiger playing
with its mother. But this quiet dignity did not satisfy him as much as did the glory of
carnage. The pictures in which he celebrates it are usually described as 'lion-hunts', but
there is no evidence that the men have had the insolent courage to go out hunting lions.
These are simply episodes in a war between men and animals in which, for the first time
in art, the outcome is uncertain.
The horse plays a large part in Delacroix animal battle pieces, but it is far from being the
horse of instruction. Usually it is the wretched victim. But occasionally it too is made to
participate in the general frenzy, as in the famous watercolour in the Louvre of a horse
frightened by lightning. Delacroix noted in his
Journal, 'Art does not consist in copying
nature, but in recreating it, and this applies particularly to the representation of animals';
and he adds a comment on horses 'One mustn't aim at the perfection of the naturalists'.
The words come to our mind in front of his picture of horses fighting in a stable, which is
certainly not painted from nature, but is a superb arabesque of animal ferocity.
