SOURCE: Hannoosh, Michèle. “A Painter's Impressions of Modernity: Delacroix, Citizen of the Nineteenth Century.” In Impressions of French Modernity: Art and Literature in France 1850-1900, edited by Richard Hobbs, pp. 9-29. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998.

In the following essay, an earlier version of which was presented as a lecture in 1996, Hannoosh examines Delacroix's conception of time, as seen in the Journal, and investigates the painter's reaction to the technological and industrial revolution occurring around him.

‘Toutes ces aventures de tous les jours prennent sous cette plume un intérêt incroyable’ (All those everyday happenings become, under his pen, incredibly interesting).¹ As most readers have acknowledged since its first publication in 1893, Delacroix's diary is one of the richest writings on art and one of the finest examples of artists' writings in the literature of art history.² Yet as his observation, cited here, about the Mémoires of...