The Form of Memory: Delacroix and the Sketchbook.

This article examines Eugène Delacroix's evolving use of the travel sketchbook as a complex form of memory recording throughout his career. Initially serving as a research tool to gather visual motifs for later paintings, Delacroix's sketchbooks from trips to England (1825), Morocco (1832), and later travels reveal a shift toward capturing temporal experience and embodied sensations, blending documentary detail with personal memory. His Moroccan sketchbooks notably combined visual information, tourist souvenirs, and attempts to preserve fleeting impressions amid colonial contexts, reflecting his anxiety about forgetting. In his later years, Delacroix's reflections on memory emphasized the interplay between imagination and recollection, viewing sketches as triggers for memory rather than exact replicas, and using landscape drawings to evoke both personal and familial pasts. The article situates Delacroix's sketchbooks as material and temporal objects that negotiate the tension between preserving lived experience and the inevitable loss of memory.