The Marginalian
The Marginalian

Delacroix’s Rare Illustrations for Goethe’s Faust

“Why not take advantage of those antidotes to civilization, good books? They give strength and peace of mind,” 25-year-old Eugène Delacroix urged himself in his journal in 1823 while trying to reconcile his social life with the solitude his work required — work that would eventually render him one of humanity’s most significant artists. Among the great books in which he found strength and peace of mind was Goethe’s Faust — so much so that he felt compelled to capture the beloved book’s spirit in his art.

In February of that year, he wrote in the journal:

The things that are most real to me are the illusions which I create with my painting. Everything else is quicksand.

In another entry from the same month, he envisioned Goethe as a creative catalyst for his own work:

Every time I look at the engravings of Faust I am seized with a longing to use an entirely new style of painting that would consist, so to speak, in making a literal tracing of nature. The simplest poses could be made interesting by varying the amount of foreshortening.

By 1825, he had accomplished just that in a series of black-and-white lithographs — an interesting choice, given Goethe’s writings on the psychology of color and emotion — which created a mesmerizing dialogue across disciplines between these two geniuses, half a century apart in age. The result was a fine addition to history’s greatest artistic interpretations of literary classics — including William Blake’s paintings for Milton’s Paradise Lost, Maurice Sendak’s formative etchings for Blake’s “Songs of Innocence,” Ralph Steadman’s illustrations for Orwell’s Animal Farm, Tove Jansson’s take on Alice in Wonderland, and Salvador Dalí’s paintings for Cervantes’s Don Quixote, Dante’s Divine Comedy, Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, and the essays of Montaigne.

Upon seeing Delacroix’s drawings for his masterwork, 76-year-old Goethe wrote to his good friend Johann Peter Eckermann:

The more perfect imagination of such an artist forces us to think the situations as well as he has though them himself. I must now admit that M. Delacroix has surpassed my own conception in certain scenes!

In 1828, Delacroix’s lithographs were published in Paris as a rare large-format folio. For more than a century, these exquisite drawings remained virtually unknown. In 1932, New York’s Heritage Press finally resurrected them in Faust: A Tragedy (public library) — a gorgeous limited-edition slipcase volume, featuring reproductions of Delacroix’s eighteen lithographs restored through a collotype process.

Scholar Carl F. Schreiber captures Goethe’s transcendent genius in the introduction to this 1932 edition:

Toward noon on March twenty-second, 1832, Goethe closed his eyes forever on a world which he was privileged to understand as few human beings have been permitted to know it. For a period of eighty-two years those eyes … had observed the objects of this earth with a profound reverence; they had peered into the mysteries of human existence with a hope of solving the imponderables that hold the lives of men enmeshed. Goethe’s genius persevered, even in old age, a childlike wonderment and an untrammeled vision to a phenomenal degree. His reverence for all forms of life is a definite mark of his genius… Whatever Goethe was, he was first and foremost a devoted observer… Goethe was a seer.

Although this beautiful 1932 edition is deeply out of print, surviving copies can still be found with some luck and dedication. Complement it with Picasso’s illustrations for a racy Greek comedy and William Blake’s breathtaking drawings for Dante’s Divine Comedy, over which he labored until his dying day.


Published April 28, 2015

https://www.themarginalian.org/2015/04/28/delacroix-goethe-faust/

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