The Death of Sardanapalus
Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863) · 1827
Besieged in his palace at Nineveh and facing defeat, the Assyrian king Sardanapalus orders everything he owns destroyed before the enemy can take it: his concubines, his horses, his treasure. He reclines on an enormous red bed and watches. Delacroix took the idea from Byron's verse drama of 1821, then abandoned Byron's plot entirely, since in the play the women are spared and the king dies on a pyre with one willing companion. What is on the wall is Delacroix's own invention, a fantasy of total annihilation staged as luxury.
There is no reliable floor, no stable horizon, and no single vanishing point. The bed tilts down towards you like a slide, and bodies, gold plate, an elephant-headed bed post and a dying horse tumble along it. The red of the drapery sets the temperature for the whole canvas, and Delacroix scatters warm flesh tones against it so that the eye never settles. The restoration completed in 2023 recovered the vivid oppositions of orange, green and violet that varnish had flattened, and the jewels and metalwork now glitter as sharply as he intended.
The Salon of 1827 hated it. The director of Fine Arts told Delacroix to change his manner or lose all official commissions, and the painter kept the picture in his studio for eighteen years before selling it. It reached the Louvre only in 1921, through a bequest, and has since become the central monument of French Romanticism. A smaller autograph version of 1844 is in Philadelphia. Look for the woman in the left foreground whose throat is being cut while she seems almost to be sleeping.
Did You Know? The picture nearly ended Delacroix's official career: after the 1827 Salon he was warned that no state commission would come his way unless he painted differently.
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