Dear curators of creative-person house museums: this is how it should be done. Eugène Delacroix was a 19th century painter – think Liberty Leading the People (patriotically stirring) or The Death of Sardanapalus (just plain stirring). This museum solves the following house-museum problems with flying colors:
- Where do we put the museum? The Delacroix House is in a very chi-chi Left Bank neighborhood – it’s a fairly small apartment with an attached atelier/ show-room specially built for Delacroix. It was the last apartment he lived in; as the French-English-Spanish signage cheerfully informs you, he died in its bedroom. May chills of historical frissons run down your cultured spine!
- What do we put in the museum? The Delacroix House doesn’t do the whining about its inability to restore the place to its exact past appearance; rather, they clearly indicate the purpose of each room and list its former contents (from an inventory made at Delacroix’s death). Then, they use the rooms to display drawings, preparatory sketches, and a few paintings.
- Why do we have this museum again? Too many house-of-famous-person museums fail to even think about this question, preferring to have an attitude of “aren’t we all just here to look at Paul Bunyan’s dentures?” By contrast, at the Delacroix House you’ll learn a lot about Delacroix’s working methods (and, by extension, those of painters in general), thanks to a range of items from doodles in pocket notebooks to careful drawings of posed models to oil studies working out color balance. Everything is enjoyable to look at – Delacroix has a flexible, fluid drawing style which reveals what he’s most interested by in a scene and what he finds tricky to reproduce. And the subject matter is enjoyable, too: he was absolutely obsessed with lions and tigers, as well as stuff from Morocco, pretty women, horses, etc. Even his more traditional subject matter is interesting – for example, all of his female saints seem to be experiencing an ecstasy only partially spiritual.
In sum: educational, aesthetically pleasing, and bite-sized. And, yes, I know that Paul Bunyan was not a real person.
