Elisabeth Fraser’s fine study of the French painter Eugène Delacroix’s early career is as much a work of inventive cultural history as of art history. Reading the paintings that made the artist’s reputation in the 1820s as part of the wider visual culture of post-revolutionary France, she challenges a standard view that equates Romanticism with liberalism and links Delacroix with political opposition to the Bourbon monarchy restored after the fall of Napoleon in 1814. Instead, she highlights his success under royal patronage, and suggests that “Delacroix’s art was as much formed by monarchical rule as it was part of the resistance to that rule” (3). In doing so, Fraser offers an important addition to Delacroix scholarship, as well as a growing literature concerned with the legacy of the French Revolution and the dynamics of post-revolutionary political culture.

Fraser’s starting point is the essential paradox faced by the monarchs of the Bourbon Restoration (1814–1830): How could they claim legitimacy when the institution of monarchy itself had been delegitimized? Her interpretation of Restoration politics follows that of historian Sheryl Kroen, whose Politics and Theater: The Crisis of Legitimacy in Restoration France, 1815–1830 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000) details attempts by the restored kings, Louis XVIII and Charles X, to assert continuity with the monarchical past through a policy of oubli, or forgetting, that re-established the principle of divine right and banned symbols and practices associated with the Republic and Napoleonic Empire. The regicidal cat was out of the bag, however, and it proved impossible to pretend otherwise. Secret republican societies and a black market for Napoleonic souvenirs flourished, while the stiff corpulence of the Bourbons did little to endear them to their subjects. It was under this regime, increasingly unpopular, especially as the reactionary ultra faction gained influence under Charles X, that Delacroix began his career.

Fraser follows Lynn Hunt, another historian whose influence runs through this book, and others in placing issues of family, inheritance, and masculine authority at the heart of the post-revolutionary crisis of legitimacy, and contends that similar questions of “patrimony” underpinned the conception, execution, and reception of Delacroix’s art during the Restoration. After laying out this historical and analytical background in the introduction, she turns to three case studies of Delacroix’s first major works—Dante and Virgil (1822), Scenes from the Massacres of Chios (1824), and The Death of Sardanapalus (1828)—to demonstrate how Delacroix’s work was implicated in what Hunt calls in the title of her book “the family romance of the French Revolution” (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992).

Fraser dedicates her first chapter to Dante and Virgil, the scene from Dante’s Inferno that marked Delacroix’s Salon début in 1822. She reads this painting of the two great poets as an account of the artist’s search for artistic paternity. The chapter opens with a lengthy excursion into long-standing rumors about Delacroix’s illegitimate birth, which the author uses as an entrée into the uncertainty about artistic patrimony that Delacroix shared with other mid-nineteenth-century French artists struggling to adapt to the rising influence of the public Salon exhibitions and to escape the Neo-Classical shadow of Jacques-Louis David. Drawing on Delacroix’s voluminous journals, essays, and correspondence as well as her own sensitive visual analysis, Fraser suggests that Dante and Virgil, with its theme of intellectual inspiration and its stylistic homage to Michelangelo, Rubens, and Géricault, constituted a fantasy of artistic fatherhood by a young painter seeking aesthetic and professional models.

In the first of two chapters on Delacroix’s second major Salon entry, Scenes from the Massacres of Chios, Fraser sets out to revise standard interpretations of this work as a statement of liberal-Romantic support for the Greek uprising against the Ottoman Empire that began in 1821. She agrees with the usual view that Delacroix depicted the Greeks as feminized victims in need of (masculine) French protection, but argues that his fragmented image of broken families shared the counterrevolutionary family values expressed in contemporary prints and genre paintings. The family metaphors embodied in these works defined and linked the monarchical state, Romantic concepts of ethnic nationhood, and, ultimately, French colonial ambitions in the crumbling Ottoman Empire. In this, she concludes, “far from being a painting that stirred political fractiousness within France, [the Massacres] could be seen as a consensus painting that reinforced the unity of France at the expense of the outside,” even if that consensus challenged the government’s non-interventionist stance on the Greek War (77).

The second chapter on the Massacres uses newly discovered documents from the French National Archives to show that painting was also, paradoxically, caught in a growing rivalry between the monarchy and private collectors, like the duc d’Orléans (later King Louis-Philippe), for patronage of the French arts. Letters about the purchase of the Massacres at the Salon detail royal arts administrators’ desperation to preempt a private buyer, and they lead Fraser into a fascinating discussion of the role of art criticism and private collecting in contemporary politics. Doing for the Restoration what Thomas Crow did for the eighteenth century in Painters and Public Life in Eighteenth-Century Paris (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), she demonstrates convincingly that shifts in possible publics and patronage constituted “a volatile public sphere” (111) that seriously challenged monarchical authority while defining Delacroix’s professional trajectory.

Given the wealth of insight yielded by her inquiry into the reception of the Massacres and Sardanapalus, it is not surprising that Fraser’s first chapter on the Massacres is most successful in contextualizing Delacroix’s painting within contemporary family imagery. Its conclusion that the Massacres embodied French colonial ambitions would have benefited from a similar consideration of representations of empire. This imagery was pervaded by anxieties about France’s moral and practical fitness for colonial rule that made race and empire highly unstable categories in the post-revolutionary period. As Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby points out in her Extremities: Painting Empire in Post-Revolutionary France (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), the threat of miscegenation in Delacroix’s Massacres—as well as its sequel, Greece on the Ruins of Missolonghi (1826), which is surprisingly absent from Fraser’s volume—resonated as much with concerns about the inversion of racial hierarchies and the decline of French imperial power in the aftermath of the rebellion in Saint-Domingue (1791–1804) as with paternalist feeling for the Greeks. This was reflected in visual culture, where popular prints embraced both widespread desire for greater military and diplomatic influence in the Mediterranean and the consistent hostility of Restoration public opinion to actual imperial expansion. When the monarchy did strike out overseas by invading Algiers in May 1830, it was greeted with accusations of the very Sardanapalian despotism Fraser so neatly outlines in her final chapter. As resentment of Charles X built toward his overthrow just weeks after Algiers’s capture, dozens of satirical prints and caricatures equated the king’s colonial ambitions with a tyrannical impulse to crush freedom at home. The rewarding attention to broader visual culture elsewhere in Fraser’s book should, however, suggest new avenues for future investigations of race and empire in Delacroix’s work, especially the body of images inspired by his 1832 trip to North Africa.

Fraser concludes with a discussion of The Death of Sardanapalus, Delacroix’s most controversial early work and the only one the state did not purchase at the Salon. Here she draws on another important archival find, a letter from Charles X’s Director of Fine Arts to the Director of Royal Museums demanding that Delacroix’s picture of the legendary Assyrian king be removed from the Louvre’s Grand Salon after the Salon opened. To explain why the king’s representatives found it so dangerous, Fraser explores its resonance with a long French tradition of invoking “Oriental despotism” to critique the crown. By focusing history painting on the spectacular demise of a ruler associated with cowardice, perversion, and voluptuous effeminacy, Delacroix highlighted the failure of gout-ridden, scandal-plagued Charles X to embody ideals of masculine authority. In comparison with the stoic masculinity of Davidian Neo-Classicism, Delacroix’s sensual image of orgiastic violence “worked in concert” (158) with political caricatures to emphasize the corporeality of the royal body, collapsing the distinction between physical and sacred bodies on which the monarchy’s dynastic claims rested.

Fraser is at her best in the last two chapters, which are the book’s most invigorating and original. They shed important new light on two iconic works by situating them within the visual and political culture of the period, adroitly circumvent the simplistic finger pointing of Orientalist critique, and they avoid facile attributions of intention to the artist. As she writes of Sardanapalus, “My argument is concerned with the resonance Delacroix’s painting had in a particular historical juncture, with or without the conscious desire of the artist” (121). This approach is supported by impressively wide-ranging research, and the documents she has unearthed about one of the nineteenth-century’s most exhaustively researched artists must count as a major coup. They explain the exceptionally early purchase of the Massacres, and provide direct evidence of official disapproval of Sardanapalus, which previously could only be inferred from an allusion in Delacroix’s correspondence. The new documents are reproduced (in French) in two appendices, which will be a valuable resource for future researchers.

Those interested in Restoration visual culture will appreciate the many black-and-white prints and lesser-known genre paintings reproduced in this slim volume. The few color plates are of lesser quality, although this is hardly critical for such well-known paintings. Overall, however, Fraser’s clear prose, lucid argument, and original interpretation will make her book required reading not only for scholars and students of nineteenth-century French art and its institutions, but also for those in all disciplines interested in post-revolutionary France or interdisciplinary approaches to visual and political culture.