THE HASTY PERFECTIONIST

FRANCE'S famed Eugene Delacroix (1798-1863) once told an art student: "If you are not skillful enough to sketch a man jumping out of a window in the time it takes him to fall from the fourth story to the ground, you will never be able to produce great works." Delacroix's aim, as his friend French Poet Charles Baudelaire put it more precisely, was "to execute quickly enough and with sufficient sureness so as not to allow any element in the intensity of an act or idea to be lost." To this end Delacroix worked continually to perfect his drawing, at his death left behind him no less than 11,000 pastels, watercolors and sketches. A selection of these, on view this week at Harvard's Fogg Art Museum (see opposite), shows how much this wealth of preparation contributed to the magic of the paintings that have made his name.

Paradoxically, while he sketched rapidly, Delacroix spent eight months in preliminary studies for a single painting, The Massacre at Scio. In many ways, he approached painting itself as a great performer approaches music; he believed that only endless practice prepares the artist for the grand performance when he must soar above pedestrian problems of technique. He was in continual revolt against the neoclassic manner that Ingres had inherited from Napoleon's court painter. David. To find a counterbalance, Delacroix went back to Rubens' tumultuous, baroque style. A cold, diffident man in private life, he drew his inspiration from music, or from the grand gestures of English Actor Edmund Kean's playing of Shakespearean tragedies or the literary works (Goethe, Sir Walter Scott, Byron and Tas-so), noting in his journal, "Remember eternally certain passages from Byron to inflame your imagination."

Though in his day Delacroix won even Goethe's praise for his Faust drawings, much of his theatrical subject matter--triumphant crusaders, fierce sultans and pashas, sultry harem girls--today seems mawkish. Probably only his scenes drawn on the barricades during the 1830 revolution still hold men's imagination. But if Delacroix's content is dated, his art is not. He attacked his craft with an iron will, raising color to a central, expressive role and making discoveries in form and line that still delight the eye.

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