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Eugène Delacroix

French painter (1798–1863)
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Eugène Delacroix (April 26 1798 – August 13 1863) was a French painter, one of the leading artists of Romanticism in Europe of the nineteenth century.

Delacroix, 'Selfportrait', c. 1837; - quote of Delacroix, 1859: 'They say that truth is naked. I cannot admit this for any but abstract truths; in the arts, all truths are produced by methods which show the hand of the artist' .

Quotes of Delacroix

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sorted chronologically, by date of the quotes of Eugène Delacroix
 
'The barque of Dante' - 1822
 
'Greece on the Ruins of Missolonghi' - 1827
 
'A young tiger playing with its mother' - 1830
 
'Frédéric Chopin' - 1838
 
'The Entry of the Crusaders into Constantinople' - 1840
 
'Christ on the Cross' (sketch) - 1845
 
'The Agony in the Garden' - 1861

1815 - 1830

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  • For a man who is sensitive to nature, happiness consists in expressing nature. How infinitely happy, then, is the man who reflects nature like a mirror without being aware of it, who does the thing for love of it and not from any pretensions to take first place. This noble unself-consciousness is what we find in all truly great men, in the founders of the arts. I picture the great Poussin, in his retreat, delighting in the study of the human heart.. ..I picture Raphael in the arms of his mistress, turning from La Fornarina to paint his Saint Cecilia.. ..I am only too well aware that I am far not only from their divine spirit, but even from their modest simplicity...
    • Quote in a letter to Delacroix' friend J. B. Pierret, 23 October 1818, from the Forest of Boixe; as quoted in Eugene Delacroix – selected letters 1813 – 1863, ed. and transl. Jean Stewart, art Works MFA publications, Museum of Fine Art Boston, 2001, p. 43
  • In the midst of the activities that distract me [shooting partridges in the woods], when I remember a few lines of poetry, when I recall some sublime painting, my spirit is roused to indignation and spurns the vain sustenance of the common herd. And in the same way, when I think of those I love, my soul clings eagerly to the elusive trace of these cherished ideas. Yes, I am sure of it, great friendship is like great genius, and the remembrance of a great and enduring friendship is like that of great works of genius... What a life would be that of two great poets who loved each other as we do! That would be too great for human kind.
    • Quote in a letter to his friend J. B. Pierret, 18 September 1818, from the Forest of Boixe; as quoted in Eugene Delacroix – selected letters 1813 – 1863”, ed. and translation Jean Stewart, art Works MFA publications, Museum of Fine Art Boston, 2001, p. 41
  • ..The movement and the rustle of the branches [in the forest, while losing his attention for chasing] delights me. The clouds float past and I lift my head to follow their flight, or think about some madrigal, when a slight sound, which has been going on for a little while, rouses me slowly from my dream.; at least I turn my head and see, to my grief, a little white scut just disappearing into the thicket...
    • Quote in a letter to Delacroix' friend Achille Peron - 16 September 1819, Paris; as quoted in Eugene Delacroix – selected letters 1813 – 1863, ed. and translation Jean Stewart, art Works MFA publications, Museum of Fine Art Boston, 2001, p. 51
  • I am thinking of painting for the coming Salon a picture [probably the large and unfinished painting 'Botzaris' by Delacroix] whose subject I shall take from the recent wars between the Turks and the Greeks. I think that.. .. this would be a way to attract some attention. I should therefore like you to send me some drawings of the country round Naples, a few quick sketches of seascapes or picturesque mountain sites... Why not also send a few of the studies you have in your portfolio? You don’t need them while you are out there, and it would oblige you to make some more of them.
    • Quote in his letter to Charles Soulier - 15 September 1821, Paris; as quoted in Eugene Delacroix – selected letters 1813 – 1863, ed. and translation Jean Stewart, art Works MFA publications, Museum of Fine Art Boston, 2001, p. 105
  • I must try to live austerely, as Plato did.. .I need to live a more solitary life.. .Valuable ideas beyond number miscarry because I have no continuity in my thoughts.. ..The things which we experience for ourselves when we are on our own are stronger by far, and fresher... [his painting 'The Massacre at Chios' was half done when he wrote this note].
    • autobiographical note in Delacroix' Journal, March 1824; as quoted in Eugene Delacroix – selected letters 1813 – 1863, ed. and translation Jean Stewart, art Works MFA publications, Museum of Fine Art Boston, 2001, p. 9
  • I have seen here [in London] a play on Faust, the most diabolic thing imaginable. The Mephistopheles is a masterpiece of caricature and intelligence. It is Goethe's 'Faust', but adapted; the principle features are preserved. They have made it into an opera mixed with comedy and with everything that is most sombre. The scene in the church is given with the priest's chanting and the organ in the distance. Impossible to carry an effect further, in the theater.
    • Quote in a letter (written in London, England) to J. B. Pierret, 18 June 1825; as quoted in Letters of the great artists – from Blake to Pollock, Richard Friedenthal, Thames and Hudson, London, 1963, p. 67
  • I am not doing very much as yet. I am put out by this manner of the Salon. They will end by persuading me that I have produced a veritable fiasco. But I am not yet entirely convinced of it. Some say it is a complete downfall; that the 'Death of Sardanaplus' [Delacroix painted this painting in 1827 after the drama, written by Byron] is that of the Romantics, inasmuch as Romantics do exist; others merely say that I am an 'inganno' [a fraud].. ..So I say they are all imbeciles, that the picture has its qualities and its defects, and that while there are some things I could wish to be better, there are not a few others that I think myself fortunate to have created, and which I wish them.
    • Quote in a letter to Delacroix' friend Charles Soulier, 11 March 1828; as quoted in Letters of the great artists – from Blake to Pollock, Richard Friedenthal, Thames and Hudson, London, 1963, pp. 67-68
  • Well! A general invasion: Hamlet rears his hideous head, Othello is preparing his dagger, that essentially murderous weapon, subversive of all good theatrical government. What more, who knows.. .King Lear is to tear his eyes before a French audience. It should be a point of dignity for the Academy to declare that all imports of this kind are incompatible with public morals. Farewell good taste! In any case, equip yourself with a stout coat of mail under your evening dress. Beware of the Classicist's daggers, or rather, sacrifice yourself valiantly for our barbarian pleasure..
    • quote on Hamlet, in a letter to Victor Hugo, 1828; as quoted in Letters of the great artists – from Blake to Pollock -, Richard Friedenthal, Thames and Hudson, London, 1963, p. 67
  • I have started work on a modern subject, a scene on the barricades.. .I may not have fought for my country but at least I shall have painted for her.. [quote is referring to his famous painting 'Liberty Leading the People', 1830]
    • Quote in an unpublished letter to Delacroix' brother, 18 October 1830, but mentioned by M. Sérullaz; as quoted in Eugene Delacroix – selected letters 1813 – 1863, ed. and translation Jean Stewart, art Works MFA publications, Museum of Fine Art Boston, 2001, p. 13

Delacroix' 'Journal' (1822 – 1824)

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Quotes from: The Journal of Eugene Delacroix : A Selection (1980) ed. Hubert Wellington, translated by Lucy Norton, Cornell University Press ISBN 0-8014-9196-7
  • The contour should come last, only a very experienced eye can place it rightly.
    • Introduction (p. xxiv)
  • Of late, men seem to have been possessed by an incomprehensible impulse to strip themselves of everything with which nature has endowed them in order to make them superior to the beasts of burden. A philosopher is a gentleman who sits down four times a day to the best meals he can possibly obtain, and who considers that virtue, glory and noble sentiments should be indulged in only when they do not interfere with those four indispensable functions and all the rest of his little personal comforts. At this rate, a mule is a better philosopher by far, because in addition to all this he puts up with blows and hardship without complaint.
    • Quote, 29 April 1824 (p. 35)
  • There is no merit in being truthful when one is truthful by nature, or rather when one can be nothing else; it is a gift, like poetry or music. But it needs courage to be truthful after carefully considering the matter, unless a kind of pride is involved; for example, the man who says to himself, "I am ugly," and then says, "I am ugly" to his friends, lest they should think themselves the first to make the discovery.
    • Quote, 6 June 1824 (p. 45)

1831 - 1863

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  • ..that famous idea of 'beauty', which is, as everybody says, the goal of the arts. If it is their only goal, what becomes of the men like Rubens, Rembrandt, and all the northern natures generally, who prefer other qualities? Demand purity, In a word beauty.. .In general the men of the north tend less in that direction. The Italian prefers ornament.
    • Quote 1847, as cited in Artists on Art – from the 14th – 20th centuries, ed. by Robert Goldwater and Marco Treves; Pantheon Books, 1972, London, p. 229
  • One has to see a painter in his own place to get an idea of his worth. I went back there [to Corot's studio, after the official exhibition] and I appreciate in a new light the paintings that I had seen in the Museum and that had struck me as middling.. .He told me to go a bit ahead of myself, abandoning myself to whatever might come; this is how he works most of the time.. .Corot delves deeply into a subject; ideas come to him and he adds while working; it's the right approach.
    • Quote from entry of Delacroix's Journal, 14 March, 1847; as cited in Selected writings on Art and Artists, transl. P. E. Charvet – Cambridge University Press, Archive, 1981, p. 150, note 44
    • This visit of Delacroix was the beginning of an important friendship
  • I see in painters prose writers and poets. Rhyme, measure, and the turning of verses, which is indispensable and which gives them so much vigor, are analogous to the hidden symmetry, to the equilibrium at once wise and inspired, which governs the meeting or separation of lines and spaces, the echoes of color, etc... ..but the beauty of verse does not consist of exactitude in obeying rules.. .It resides in a thousand secret harmonies and conventions which make up the power of poetry and which go straight to the imagination; in just the same way the happy choice of forms and the right understanding of their relationship act on the imagination in the art of painting.
    • Quote in Delacroix's Journal of 19 September 1847; as cited in Artists on Art – from the 14th – 20th centuries, ed. by Robert Goldwater and Marco Treves; Pantheon Books, 1972, London, p. 229
  • Criticism, like so many other things, keeps to what has been said before and does not get out of the rut. This business of the 'Beautiful' some see it in curved lines, some in straight lines, but all persist in seeing it as a matter of line. I am now looking out of my window and I can see the most lovely countryside; lines just do not come into my head: the lark is singing, the river sparkles with a thousand diamonds, the leaves are whispering; where, I should like to know, are the lines that produce delicious impressions like these? They refuse to see proportion or harmony except between two lines: all else they regard as chaos, and the dividers alone are judge.
    • Quote from a letter to Léon Peisse, 15 July 1949; as cited in Letters of the great artists – from Blake to Pollock, Richard Friedenthal, Thames and Hudson, London, 1963, p. 68
    • this quote refers to Delacroix's refusal to use the line as boundary of the form in his painting art, as a too sharp dividing force in the picture - in contrast to the famous classical painter in Paris then, Ingres
  • If you make the light dominate too much, the breadth of the planes leads to the absence of half tints, and consequently to discoloration; the opposite abuse is harmful above all in big compositions destined to be seen from a distance, like ceilings, etc. In the latter form of painting, Paul Veronese goes beyond Rubens through the simplicity of his local color and his breadth in handling the light.. .Veronese had greatly to strengthen his local color in order that it should not appear discolored when immunized by the very broad light he threw on it.
    • Quote in Delacroix's Journal of 1850; as cited in Artists on Art – from the 14th – 20th centuries, ed. by Robert Goldwater and Marco Treves; Pantheon Books, 1972, London, pp. 230 – 231
  • Perhaps we shall one day find that Rembrandt is a greater painter than Raphael. I write down this blasphemy which will cause the hair of the school-men to stand on end without taking sides.
    • Quote in Delacroix's Journal of 1851; as cited in The Rise of the Cult of Rembrandt: Reinventing an Old Master in Nineteenth-Century France (2004) by Alison McQueen, p. 102
  • One should always be desiring or hoping for something. When one can hope for that which one desires, one enjoys the greatest happiness of which our thinking apparatus is capable. To obtain what one has been desiring is the first step to the depths of sadness and even pain, from which one can never emerge. The sea still enchants me; I linger for three or four hours at a time on the jetty or at the edge of the cliffs. Impossible to tear oneself away. If I could lead such a life for a certain time, coupling it with some interesting occupation, I should enjoy excellent health.
    • Quote from his letter to Madame de Forget, Dieppe, 13 September 1852; as quoted in Letters of the great artists – from Blake to Pollock, Richard Friedenthal, Thames and Hudson, London, 1963, p. 68
    • Delacroix's quote refers to his stay at the coast at Dieppe
  • To be like other people is the real condition of happiness. Sea air and diversions are producing this miraculous effect upon me. What you need is just the contrary. You are dying of boredom from what most mortals regard as bliss – having nothing to do. You need the treatment opposite to mine; I am not joking in the very least: one has to be compelled to some task, driven to it: anyone who is not a drunken brute must achieve boredom at all costs unless he can discover the secret of a taste for amusements.. .These reflections.. ..are not likely to comfort you, but they will change your frame of mind for a few minutes. I shall probably be back in Paris on Thursday...
    • In: a letter to Madame de Forget, Dieppe, 13 September 1852; as quoted in Letters of the great artists – from Blake to Pollock, Richard Friedenthal, Thames and Hudson, London, 1963, p. 68
  • How do things stand, now, if the subject contains a large element of pathos?.. .Consider such an interesting subject as the scene taking place around the bed of a dying woman, for example; seize and render that ensemble by photography, if that is possible [photography was a very recent invention in Paris ca. 1853, a.o. by the photographer Nadar ]: it will be falsified in a thousand ways. The reason is that, according to the degree of your imagination, the subject will appear to you more or less beautiful, you will be more or less the poet in that scene in which you are an actor; you see only what is interesting, whereas the instrument puts in everything.
    • In Artists on Art – from the 14th – 20th centuries, ed. by Robert Goldwater and Marco Treves; Pantheon Books, 1972, London, p. 233
    • quote circa 1853, in which Delacroix relates painting to theater from the view of the visitor / spectator
  • The original idea, the sketch, which is so to speak the egg or embryo of the idea, is usually far from being complete; it contains everything, which is simply a mixing together of all parts. Just the thing that makes of this sketch the essential expression of the idea is not the suppression of details, but their complete subordination to the big lines, which are, before all else, to create the impression. The greatest difficulty therefore is that of returning in the picture to that effacing of the details which, however, make up the composition, the web and the woof of the picture.
    • quote in 1854, in Artists on Art – from the 14th – 20th centuries, ed. by Robert Goldwater and Marco Treves; Pantheon Books, 1972, London, pp. 234 – 235
  • He [ Michelangelo ] did not know a single one of the feelings of man, not one of his passions. When he was making an arm or a leg, it seems as if he were thinking only of that arm or leg and was not giving the slightest consideration to the way it relates with the action of the figure to which it belongs, much less to the action of the picture as a whole.. .Therein lies his great merit; he brings a sense of the grand and the terrible into even an isolated limb.
    • quote in 1854, on the Italian Renaissance artist [[w:Michelangelo|Michelangelo, as cited in Artists on Art – from the 14th – 20th centuries, ed. by Robert Goldwater and Marco Treves; Pantheon Books, 1972, London, p. 235
  • After leaving [the International Exposition in Paris, with a lot of new machines], I went to see Courbet's exhibition; he has reduced the admission to ten cents. I stay there alone for nearly an hour and discover that the picture [ 'L'atélier' / the Painter's Studio - 1855] of his which they refused [for exposing on the official Salon in Paris ] is a masterpiece; I simply could not tear myself away from the sight of it.
    • Quote in Delacroix's Journal of 3 August, 1855; as quoted in Artists on Art – from the 14th – 20th centuries, ed. by Robert Goldwater and Marco Treves; Pantheon Books, 1972, London, p. 236
  • Constable, an admirable man, is one of England's glories. I have already told you about him and about the impression he had made on me when I was making 'The massacre at Chios'. He and Turner were real reformers. They broke out of the rut of traditional landscape painting. Our School [ French Romanticism ], which today abounds in men of talent in this field, profited greatly by their example. Géricault [first leader of French Romanticism, followed by Delacroix after his early death] came back in a daze from seeing one of the great landscapes Constable sent us.
    • Quote from Delacroix' letter to Théophile Silvestre, Paris, 31 December 1858; as quoted in Eugene Delacroix – selected letters 1813 – 1863, ed. and translation Jean Stewart, art Works MFA publications, Museum of Fine Art Boston, 2001, p. 352
  • I did not come to know part II of 'Faust' until long after I made my illustrations, and even then only very superficially. It struck me as an ill-digested work, of little interest from the literary standpoint, but among those most calculated to inspire a painter owing to the mixture of characters and styles it contains.. .You asked what gave me the first idea of the Faust lithographs. I remember that about 1821 I saw the designs made by Retch [ Retzsch] and found them rather striking; but it was above all the performance of a dramatic opera on Faust that I saw in London in 1825 which stirred me to do something on the subject. The actor.. ..was a perfect Mephistopheles; he was fat, but that in no way diminished his nimbleness and his Satanic character.
    • Quote in Delacroix' letter to Philippe Burty, 1 March 1862; as quoted in Letters of the great artists – from Blake to Pollock, Richard Friedenthal, Thames and Hudson, London, 1963, p. 76
    • Delacroix describes the source of his series Faust lithographs
  • Rubens, when past fifty years of age, used the time he did not give to the business of his mission to the King of Spain in copying the superb Italian originals he found in Madrid.. .Accuracy of the eye, sureness of the hand, the art of carrying the picture on from the indications of the lay-in to the rounding out of the work, and so many other matters which are all of primary importance, demand application at every moment, and the practice of a lifetime.
    • Quote in Journal of Delacroix, Crown Publishers, New York, pp. 543-544

Delacroix' 'Journal' (1847 – 1863)

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many (but not all) quotes from: The Journal of Eugene Delacroix : A Selection (1980) edited by Hubert Wellington, translated by Lucy Norton, Cornell University Press - ISBN 0-8014-9196-7
  • The Natural History Museum is open to the public on Tuesdays and Fridays. Elephant, rhinoceros, hippopotamus; extraordinary animals! Rubens rendered them marvellously. I had a feeling of happiness as soon as I entered the place and the further I went the stronger it grew. I felt my whole being rise above commonplaces and trivialities and the petty worries of my daily life.
    • 19 January 1847 (p. 55)
 
Liberty Leading the People (1833)
  • I believe it safe to say that all progress must lead, not to further progress, but finally to the negation of progress, a return to the point of departure.
    • 23 April 1849 (p. 97)
  • Proportion applies to sculpture as to painting; perspective determines the contour; chiaroscuro gives relief through the disposition of lights and shadows in their relationship with the background; color gives the appearance of life.. .The colorists, the men who unite all the phases of painting, have to establish, at once and from the beginning, everything that is proper and essential to their art. They have to mass things in with color, even as the sculptor does with clay, marble or stone; their sketch, like that of the sculptor, must also render proportion, perspective effect, and color.
    • 15 April 1851, as quoted in Artists on Art – from the 14th – 20th centuries, ed. by Robert Goldwater and Marco Treves; Pantheon Books, 1972, London, pp. 230 – 231
  • Commonplace people have an answer for everything and nothing ever surprises them. They try to look as though they knew what you were about to say better than you did yourself, and when it is their turn to speak, they repeat with great assurance something that they have heard other people say, as though it were their own invention.
    • 25 February 1852 (p. 152)
  • The landscape [in the painting 'The Bathers', [1] 1853, by Courbet ] is of an extraordinary vigor, but Courbet has done no more than enlarge a study exhibited there, near his large canvas; the conclusion is that the figures [the two bathers in the painting] were put in afterwards and without connection with their surroundings. This brings up the question of harmony between the accessories and the principal object, a thing lacking in the majority of great painters, [15 April 1853]
    • Quote from Delacroix' Journal, as quoted in Artists on Art – from the 14th – 20th centuries, ed. by Robert Goldwater and Marco Treves; Pantheon Books, 1972, London, p. 231
    • Delacroix comments here the painting 'The Bathers' [2] of the French painter Courbet
  • Can any man say with certainty that he was happy at a particular moment of time which he remembers as being delightful? Remembering it certainly makes him happy, because he realizes how happy he could have been, but at the actual moment when the alleged happiness was occurring, did he really feel happy? He was like a man owning a piece of ground in which, unknown to himself, a treasure lay buried.
    • 28 April 1854 (p. 227)
  • The more I think about colour, the more convinced I become that this reflected half-tint is the principle that must predominate, because it is this that gives the true tone, the tone that constitutes the value, the thing that matters in giving life and character to the object. Light, to which the schools teach us to attach equal importance and which they place on the canvas at the same time as the half-tint and shadow, is really only an accident. Without grasping this principle, one cannot understand true colour, I mean the colour that gives the feeling of thickness and depth and of that essential difference that distinguishes one object from another.
    • 29 April 1854 (p. 228)
  • Perfect beauty implies perfect simplicity, a quality that at first sight does not arouse the emotions which we feel before gigantic works, objects whose very disproportion constitutes an element of beauty.
    • 7 September 1854 (p. 252)
 
The Abduction of Rebecca (1858)
  • They say that each generation inherits from those that have gone before; if this were so there would be no limit to man's improvements or to his power of reaching perfection. But he is very far from receiving intact that storehouse of knowledge which the centuries have piled up before him; he may perfect some inventions, but in others, he lags behind the originators, and a great many inventions have been lost entirely. What he gains on the one hand, he loses on the other.
    • 21 September 1854 (p. 256)
  • Delsarte tells me that Mozart stole outrageously from Galuppi, in the same way, I suppose, that Molière stole from anybody anywhere, if he found something work taking. I said that what was Mozart had not been stolen from Galuppi, or from anyone else for that matter.
    • 15 March 1855 (p. 270)
  • We should not allow ourselves to believe that writers like Poe have more imagination than those who are content with describing things as they really are. It is surely easier to invent striking situations in this way than to tread the beaten track which intelligent minds have followed throughout the centuries.
    • 6 April 1856 (p. 312)
  • We are told that Shakespeare's plays were generally performed in barns and that no great trouble was taken over the production. The constant changes of scene which, incidentally, seem the sign of a decadent art rather than one which is progressing, were shown by placards with the inscription: "A Forest," "A Prison," and so on. Within this conventional setting the onlooker's imagination was free to follow the actions of the various characters who were animated by passions drawn from nature, and that was enough for him. So-called innovations are gratefully seized on as an excuse for poverty of invention and in the same way, the long descriptive passages that so overburden modern novels are a sign of sterility, for it is obviously easier to describe a dress or the outward appearance of an object than to trace the subtle development of a character or portray the emotions of the heart.
    • 9 April 1856 (p. 313)
  • He Titian is the least mannered and consequently the most varied of artists. Mannered talents have but one bias, one usage only. They are more apt to follow the impulse of the hand than to control it. Those that are less mannered must be more varied, for they continually respond to genuine emotion.
    • 5 January 1857 (p. 326)
  • In every art we are always obliged to return to the accepted means of expression, the conventional language of the art. What is a black-and-white drawing but a convention to which the beholder has become so accustomed that with his mind's eye he sees a complete equivalent in the translation from nature?
    • 13 January 1857 (p. 334)
 
Jacob Wrestling the Angel (1861)
  • For his contemporaries, Racine was a romantic, but for every age he is classical, that is to say, he is faultless.
    • 13 January 1857 (p. 337)
  • Mythological subjects always new. Modern subjects difficult because of the absence of the nude and the wretchedness of modern costume.
    • 13 January 1857 (p. 338)
  • Painting, in the beginning, was a trade like any other. Some men became picture-makers as others became glaziers or carpenters. Painters painted shields, saddles and banners. The primitive painter was more of a craftsman than we are; he learned his trade superlatively well before he thought of letting himself go. The reverse is true today.
    • 13 January 1857 (p. 339)
  • Curiously enough, the Sublime is generally achieved through want of proportion.
    • 25 January 1857 (p. 345)
  • Nature creates unity even in the parts of a whole.
    • 25 January 1857 (p. 346)
  • The so-called conscientiousness of the great majority of painters is nothing but perfection laboriously applied to the art of being boring.
    • 25 January 1857 (p. 346)
  • Les artistes qui cherchent la perfection en tout sont ceux qui ne peuvent l'atteindre en aucune partie.
    • Artists who seek perfection in everything are those who cannot attain it in anything.
      • Quote, 14 March 1858, from Journal de Eugène Delacroix, book 3
  • They say that truth is naked. I cannot admit this for any but abstract truths; in the arts, all truths are produced by methods which show the hand of the artist.
    • 12 October 1859 (p. 388)
  • Weaknesses in men of genius are usually an exaggeration of their personal feeling; in the hands of feeble imitators they become the most flagrant blunders. Entire schools have been founded on misinterpretations of certain aspects of the masters. Lamentable mistakes have resulted from the thoughtless enthusiasm with which men have sought inspiration from the worst qualities of remarkable artists because they are unable to reproduce the sublime elements in their work.
    • 16 January 1860 (p. 391)

Quotes, undated

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  • Nature is just a dictionary, you hunt in it for words.. ..you find in it the elements which make a phrase or a story; but nobody would regard a dictionary as a composition in the poetic sense of the term. Besides, nature is far from being always interesting from the point of view of the effect of the whole.. .If each detail is perfect in some way, the union of these details seldom gives an effect equivalent to that which arises, in the work of a great artist, from the total composition.

Quotes about Eugene Delacroix

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sorted chronologically, by date of the quotes about Eugène Delacroix
  • Delacroix, lac de sang hanté des mauvaises anges,
    Ombragés par un bois de sapins toujours vert,
    Où, sous un ciel chagrin, des fanfares étranges
    Passent, comme un soupir étouffé de Weber.
    • Delacroix, blood lake, domain of evil angels,
      Encircled by fir trees, in depths of green darkness,
      Where, under wincing skies, such eerie fanfares drift,
      Like a smothered, love-lost sigh, an air of Weber.
  • ..but there is a master canvas in the Palais The Luxembourg: 'The Bargue of Dante'. If we want to visit Delacroix, our pretext might be to ask him permission to do a copy of the Bargue.. [after having visited Delacroix who received them graciously, but emphasized them repeatedly the importance of studying Rubens, Manet said to his friend A. Proust:] ..Delacroix isn't cold at all, but his doctrine is frozen. Anyway, we'll copy the Bargue. It's a fine piece.
    • Quote of Edouard Manet, recorded by fr:Antonin Proust, early 1850's; as cited in Manet, ed. Françoise Cachin, Charles S. Moffett, Juliet Wilson Bareau; publication of Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York 1983
  • Delacroix était passionnément amoureux de la passion, et froidement déterminé à chercher les moyens d'exprimer la passion de la manière la plus visible. Dans ce double caractère, nous trouvons, disons-le en passant, les deux signes qui marquent les plus solides génies, génies extrêmes.
    • Delacroix was passionately in love with passion, and coldly determined to seek the means of expressing passion in the most visible manner. In this dual character, be it said in passing, we find the two distinguishing marks of the most substantial geniuses, extreme geniuses.
    • Variant translation: Delacroix was passionately in love with passion, but coldly determined to express passion as clearly as possible.
      • As quoted in the Introduction to The Journal of Eugène Delacroix (1980), p. xiv
  • Eugène Delacroix was a curious mixture of skepticism, politeness, dandyism, willpower, cleverness, despotism, and finally, a kind of special goodness and tenderness that always accompanies genius.
  • ...and, to tell the truth, I find it very difficult to like new art. It is only lately, and after having been unsympathetic for a great while, that I at last understood Eugene Delacroix, whom I now think a great man.
    • Quote of Camille Corot, c 1860's; as quoted by Arthur Hoebert, in The Barbizon Painters – being the story of the Men of thirty – associate of the National Academy of Design; publishers, Frederick A. Stokes Company, New York 1915, p. 61
  • Color, which is controlled by fixed laws, can be taught like music. . . . It is because he knew these laws, and studied them profoundly, after having intuitively divined them, that Eugene Delacroix became one of the greatest colorists of modern times.
  • Ferdinand-Victor-Eugène Delacroix, a painter of noble lineage, who carried a sun in his head and storms in his heart; who for forty years played upon the keyboard of human passions, and whose brush— grandiose, terrifying or tender— passed from saints to warriors, from warriors to lovers, from lovers to tigers, and from tigers to flowers.
    • Quote on Delacroix by Théophile Silvestre, in Les Artistes français, études d'après nature (1878)
  • ..Something else about Delacroix — he had a discussion with a friend about the question of working absolutely from nature, and said on that occasion that one should take one's 'studies' from nature — but that the 'actual painting' had to be made 'by heart'. This friend was walking along the boulevard when they had this discussion — which was already fairly heated. When they parted the other man was still not entirely persuaded. After they parted, Delacroix let him stroll on for a bit — then (making a trumpet of his two hands) bellowed after him in the middle of the street — to the consternation of the worthy passers-by:
    'By heart! By heart!' ('Par coeur! Par coeur!')
    I can't tell you how much I enjoyed reading this article and some other things about Delacroix..
    • Quote by Vincent van Gogh, in his letter to Anthon van Rappard; from Nuenen, The Netherlands, 8 + c. 15 August, 1885 - original manuscript, letter 526, at Van Gogh Museum, location Amsterdam - inv. nos. b8390 V/2006, [3]
    • See for this anecdote, taken from Charles Blanc, in Les artistes de mon temps', letter 496, n. 7.
  • Delacroix was right. It is the struggle that matters. Not the outcome. I was where I should have been that Saturday in front of the Paris Opera House. Yes, our cries were not heard. Yes, it may be futile. But the fight is what makes us human. It gives us dignity. It affirms life in the face of death. “This eternal combat” brings with it, as the painter knew, a strange kind of consolation that lifts us up to the level of our despair.
  • ..what Delacroix occupies himself about, what moves him, is the drama. The subject is no great thing for this grand artist; it is naught but a pretext; the dramatic impression proceeding from it is everything. When Delacroix paints the magnificent upon the Cross'.. ..it is the supreme drama which inspires him; what he desires to render is the grand crime of the crucifixion, and not the Crucified Himself.
    • Quote of Albert Wolff, 1886, Notes upon certain masters of the XIX century, - printed not published MDCCCLXXXVI (1886), The Art Age Press, 400 N.Y. (written after the exhibition 'Cent Chefs-d'Oeuvres: the Choiche of the French Private Galleries', Petit, Paris / Baschet, New York, 1883, p. 39
  • ..The so-called classical school, men of a rare perfection in their science, understood nothing of this art - an art bursting from the painter's heart, with a passion which sometimes made it rise to the most impregnable altitudes, yet which sometimes, by its very exaggeration, brought it down again to the ground. For the works of Delacroix have their weak passages, I admit, because they are human works, because they are not born of cold calculations of the mind, and because the vexations of the painter, in following his ideal, pierce through them.
    • Quote of Albert Wolff, 1886, Notes upon certain masters of the XIX century, - printed not published MDCCCLXXXVI (1886), The Art Age Press, 400 N.Y. (written after the exhibition 'Cent Chefs-d'Oeuvres: the Choiche of the French Private Galleries', Petit, Paris / Baschet, New York, 1883, p. 40-41
  • His [Delacroix's] remains the finest palette in France and nobody in our country has possessed at once such calm and pathos, such shimmering color. We all paint in him.
  • another & longer version: Maybe Delacroix stands for Romanticism. He stuffed himself with too much Shakespeare and Dante, thumbed through too much Faust. His palette is still the most beautiful in France, and I tell you no one under the sky had more charm and pathos combined than he, or more vibration of colour. We all paint in his language, as you all write in Hugo's.
  • He [Delacroix] turns David upside down. His painting is iridescent. Seeing one Constable [famous English landscape painter, admired by French painters, then] is enough to make him understand all the possibilities of landscape, and he too sets up his easel by the sea.. .And he has a sense of human being, of life in movement, of warmth. Everything moves, every glistens. The light!.. .There is more warm light in this interior [probably: 'Woman of Algiers'] of his than in all of Corot's landscapes..
    • Quote by Paul Cézanne, in: 'What he told me – II. The Louvre', Joachim Gasquet’s 'Cézanne, - a Memoir with Conversations', (1897 - 1906); Thames and Hudson, London 1991 p. 196
  • The light! [in the paintings of Délacroix].. ..There is more warm light in this interior [probably in the painting 'Woman of Algiers'] of his than in all of Corot's landscapes..
    • Paul Cezanne's quote in: 'What he told me – II. The Louvre', in Joachim Gasquet's Cézanne, - a Memoir with Conversations, (1897 - 1906); Thames and Hudson, London 1991, p. 196
  • Delacroix felt his composition more vividly as a whole, thought of his figures and crowds as types, and dominated them by the symbolic figure of Republican Liberty which is one of his finest plastic inventions..
    • Quoted by Hubert Wellington, in The Journal of Eugène Delacroix, introduction, page xiv; translated by Lucy Norton, Cornell University Press, 1980. ISBN 0-8014-9196-7; as quoted by Wikipedia: Delacroix
  • This became Delacroix's theme: that the achievements of the spirit — all that a great library contained — were the result of a state of society so delicately balanced that at the least touch they would be crushed beneath an avalanche of pent-up animal forces.
 
Christ on the Sea of Galilee (1854)
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