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The Death of Sardanapalus is the most violent painting in the Louvre, and it was painted by the same man who painted Liberty Leading the People. Delacroix took his subject from Byron’s verse tragedy Sardanapalus, in which the last Assyrian king, faced with defeat, orders his horses, his dogs, his treasures and his women destroyed on a vast pyre so that nothing of his pleasure survives him. The king reclines on a crimson bed at the top of the composition, watching impassively while the slaughter happens around him.
The painting is built on diagonals: the bed, the bodies, the rearing horse and the sweep of the pyre all pull the eye toward the upper right, where Sardanapalus lies in a pool of red. Delacroix’s colour is deliberately clashing - crimson, gold, emerald, violet - and his brushwork is loose and agitated. There is no moral centre, no hero and no lesson. It is a painting about the aesthetics of destruction.
When it was shown at the Salon of 1827-28 it was attacked as a "massacre of painting" and a "barbaric" work. Delacroix never sold it; it stayed in his studio until his death, and it entered the Louvre in 1921. Today it is recognised as the founding statement of French Romantic painting.
Eugene Delacroix (1798-1863) trained briefly with Guerin and learned far more from Rubens, Gericault and the Venetian painters he studied in the Louvre. He was a slow, obsessive worker who reworked canvases for years, and his Journal is one of the great documents of nineteenth-century artistic life. Baudelaire called him "the most suggestive of all painters".
Byron’s Sardanapalus, published in 1821, was a Romantic cult text, and Delacroix’s painting was part of a wider European fascination with the decadent Orient. The Salon of 1827 was a battleground between the classicists around Ingres and the Romantics around Delacroix, and Sardanapalus was the Romantics’ most provocative entry.
Denon Wing · Level 1 · Salle Mollien (Room 700)
The Louvre is divided into three wings — Denon, Sully and Richelieu — reached from the hall beneath the glass pyramid.
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