Apotheosis of Delacroix

Apotheosis of Delacroix (c.1890) at the Musée Granet in Aix-en-Provence is Cézanne's most explicit tribute to the Romantic painter he considered his greatest predecessor — executed as a private homage without patron or commission, kept in his personal collection. Delacroix had died in 1863 when Cézanne was twenty-four, and throughout his career Cézanne copied Delacroix sketches, praised his colorism in conversation with Emile Bernard, and repeatedly identified him as the model for what color could achieve in painting. The composition imagines Delacroix ascending to heaven, borne aloft by allegorical figures in the tradition of Baroque apotheosis paintings, while below — in some versions — contemporary painters including Cézanne, Pissarro, and Monet watch. The Musée Granet holds this among its Cézanne collection as an intimate document of the painter's relationship with his own intellectual and artistic ancestry — a private testament that reveals the emotional depth underlying his famously austere professional manner.

The composition is loosely structured around a central rising figure surrounded by attendant forms in swirling color. Cézanne's brushwork here is freer than in his still lifes, recalling Delacroix's own fluid stroke, though the characteristic faceted patches of color still organize the surface into discrete chromatic planes.