At the 1827 Salon, Delacroix with The Death of Sardanapalus outshone Ingres, whose The Apotheosis of Homer was met with confusion. From then on, critics stubbornly compared these two painters and imagined their rivalry, summarily pitting Ingres’ drawing against Delacroix’s use of colour. Ingres is thus considered the champion of academic classicism, in opposition to Delacroix’s Romanticism. Art historians today add nuance to this rather caricatural representation and highlight both the importance of Ingres’ experiments and Delacroix’s genuine admiration for him.
“Our Exhibition has nothing regrettable. M. Hanski would not have bought much there; but if I were rich I should like to send you one picture, an Algiers interior, which seems to me excellent.”
Letter from Balzac to Madame Hanska, 28 April 1834 (Translation Katharine Prescott Wormeley)
Balzac was not rich enough to offer this painting to Mrs Hanska’s husband at the Salon and it was the State that bought The Women of Algiers, which is now kept in the Louvre Museum. Balzac had met Delacroix at salons and had a genuine admiration for him: he praised his paintings several times in The Human Comedy, and his novel The Girl with the Golden Eyes bears the dedication ‘To Eugène Delacroix, painter’. However, this high regard was not reciprocal, as in his journal the painter evokes his memories of the writer in unfriendly terms: ‘It was there too and at Nodier’s house before that I first saw Balzac, who was then a slender young man, in a blue suit, wearing, I believe, a black silk vest, and finally something discordant in his grooming and already missing some teeth. He preluded his success.’
In The Unknown Masterpiece, Balzac evokes the opposition between line and colour, rekindled in the early 19th century by the ‘quarrel’ between Ingres and Delacroix. He recommends bringing together the two systems in order to achieve what he saw as the ideal of painting: the expression of life.
“‘Ah!’ said the old man, ‘it is this! You have halted between two manners. You have hesitated between drawing and color, between the dogged attention to detail, the stiff precision of the German masters and the dazzling glow, the joyous exuberance of Italian painters. You have set yourself to imitate Hans Holbein and Titian, Albrecht Durer and Paul Veronese in a single picture. A magnificent ambition truly, but what has come of it? Your work has neither the severe charm of a dry execution nor the magical illusion of Italian chiaroscuro. Titian’s rich golden coloring poured into Albrecht Dureras austere outlines has shattered them, like molten bronze bursting through the mold that is not strong enough to hold it. In other places the outlines have held firm, imprisoning and obscuring the magnificent, glowing flood of Venetian color. The drawing of the face is not perfect, the coloring is not perfect; traces of that unlucky indecision are to be seen everywhere. Unless you felt strong enough to fuse the two opposed manners in the fire of your own genius, you should have cast in your lot boldly with the one or the other, and so have obtained the unity which simulates one of the conditions of life itself. Your work is only true in the centres; your outlines are false, they project nothing, there is no hint of anything behind them. There is truth here,’ said the old man, pointing to the breast of the Saint, ‘and again here,’ he went on, indicating the rounded shoulder. ‘But there,’ once more returning to the column of the throat, ‘everything is false. Let us go no further into detail, you would be disheartened.’”
Honoré de Balzac, The Unknown Masterpiece, 1831 (translation David Widger.)
Bertall imagines a duel in front of the Institut de France, between Eugène Delacroix, champion of colour and armed with a brush, and Dominique Ingres, a proponent of the line who is seen brandishing a pencil. Each bears on his shield or on his horse’s caparison the mottos of his supporters (even though Delacroix had no students): On Ingres’ side we see ‘Colour is utopia’; ‘Long live the line’; ‘Rubens is a red’, while Delacroix’s shield bears ‘The line is a colour’. This radical and somewhat artificial opposition between colour and line, which did not exist in the 1820s, became a dominant theme in the 1840s.