The Form of Memory: Delacroix and the Sketchbook.

For most of his career as an artist, Eugène Delacroix used designated sketchbooks during his travels, most famously on his trip to North Africa in 1832. While scholarship on Delacroix's drawings often privileges their function as preparations for later paintings, closer scrutiny of his travel albums reveals his fascination with the temporal, experiential elements of drawing. In addition to using his sketchbooks as an aide-mémoire for later paintings, this essay proposes, Delacroix sought to fix memory and explore the essence of the fleeting moment within them. By examining the touristic and memorial aspects of his sketchbooks as they evolved over time, this essay shows how Delacroix negotiated the tension between the temporal and the material, between the sketch as physical record of lived experience and the sketch as talismanic performance against the loss of memory and the passing of time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]