Black Republic of Letters

The Statue of Eugène Delacroix at the Luxembourg

The inauguration took place on Sunday. The monument erected to the great painter "by his admirers" is the work the sculptor Dalou. Twenty-seven years after his death, Eugène Delacroix finally has his bronze in this Paris that his genius helped to illustrate. It is our illustrious colleague Auguste Vacquerie who was the initiator and the soul of this act of justice and reparation.

When one wants to erect a statue in memory of a great man, money is insufficient; one also needs the sculptor capable of understanding the model who must inspire him. Photographs, still incomplete thirty years later, and taken at different phases of the painter's life, only gave Mr. Dalou vague indications; he thus had to reconstitute the entire bust, and he succeeded admirably. The features are at once energetic and traced with melancholy; proud and resigned—like the life of the master.

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