Currently reading
Vineland (Classic, 20th-Century, Penguin)
Tristes Tropiques
Richard III
The Dwarf
The Collected Poems of Wilfred Owen
Labyrinths
Giotto to Dürer: Early Renaissance Painting in the National Gallery
Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics
Gravity's Rainbow
A Gravity's Rainbow Companion: Sources and Contexts for Pynchon's Novel
The World of Delacroix: 1798-1863 (Time-Life library of art)
This book is part of the Time-Life Library of Art, and comes in a box. The library bin where I got this for pennies also has the volumes on Goya and Leonardo and some others, but I only took this one. It's excellent. The text is sober, jargon-free, informative, and the photos/prints well-chosen, not always the obvious ones, and well done, mostly in color. An all around good book, esp. for 2 bucks.Delacroix is a far more important artist than I had realized, and it was Kenneth Clark, in his book on Romanticism, that first made me understand this. Prideaux only reenforces this view.
Here is Géricault's portrait of Delacroix, painted c. 1818, about the time that Géricault was doing the Raft of Medusa (for which Delacroix was one of the models):
What really astonished me in this volume, however, were the Moroccan watercolors, done en plein air, in a sketch book.... look at these... and remember that this is 1832... I'm hardly an expert on art, but I can't think of anything quite like this that is earlier -- the freedom, the colors, the light palette..., the colors... (!)
The Bay of Tangiers
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Room in the Sultan's Palace at Meknes
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Moroccan Landscape near Tangiers
also: http://www.eugenedelacroix.org/Moroccan-Landscape-near-Tangiers-large.html
Courtyard in Tangiers
