The Form of Memory: Delacroix and the Sketchbook

The form of the sketch in the nineteenth century was highly variable, comprising a wide range of media used for many different purposes, from precise academic figure studies to compositional experiments bordering on abstraction. Within this diversity of form, the sketchbook stands out for its ability to encompass many of these types in a single, portable object. Its richness as a visual repository speaks to a certain demand for authenticity, whether of setting, costume or, as the century unfolded, of lived experience—the instantaneity associated with modernity. As the nineteenth-century ethos of the transitory grew (alongside technologies that enabled easier trips to distant locales), the sketchbook’s function as a record of travel became more common. This paper examines the role of the sketchbook and the drawings within as an aide-mémoire, a fount of information both temporal and spatial, using the notebooks of Eugène Delacroix as a case study. These sketches were made to capture the essence of a fleeting moment in a place that would never be revisited, giving them a memorial aspect. At the same time that such drawings anticipate loss, however, they look forward to a potential future metamorphosis into a finished painting. This paper will explore the ways in which Delacroix’s sketches negotiated the tension between the temporal and the material, between the sketch as physical record of lived experience suitable for transformation into finished works and the sketch as talismanic performance against the loss of memory and the passing of time.