They did not always love each other but will have to live together for months: 80 works by Eugène Delacroix are moving to the Gustave Courbet Museum in Ornans, in Doubs, which is organizing an exhibition on the two great painters of the 19th century, which will be held until February 4, 2024.
In Paris, the Eugène Delacroix national museum, attached to the Louvre museum, must close its doors for renovation work. The opportunity to move part of its collections to the Ornans museum, birthplace of Gustave Courbet (1819-1877).
Between this “rude worker” of realism and Eugène Delacroix (1798-1863), “old lion of romanticism” 20 years his senior, incomprehension prevailed for a time. Regarding Courbet’s Bathers (1853), Delacroix deplored in his journal the vulgarity and uselessness of thought. As for the youngest, he will not lack insolence towards his prestigious elder: “I would soon do the same if I wanted”, he exclaimed in 1824 in front of The Massacres of Scio, a painting by Delacroix now exhibited at the Louvre .
Delacroix would be a very great painter if the relaxation, the wantonness of his forms did not reach the point of fantasy,” Courbet even dared. Things changed in 1855, during a visit by Delacroix to the Pavilion of Realism in Paris, where Courbet’s Painter’s Workshop was exhibited. “I couldn’t tear myself away from this view,” confided the elder, hailing it “a masterpiece.” The Eugène Delacroix Museum, installed in the painter’s last apartment and studio on rue Furstenberg in Paris, will reopen its doors in March 2024.
“Delacroix invites himself to Courbet”, exhibition from October 28, 2023 to February 4, 2024 at the Gustave Courbet Museum in Ornans (Doubs).
