Eugène Delacroix Quotes

The artist who aims at perfection in everything achieves it in nothing.

La musique est la volupté de l'imagination.

The Natural History Museum is open to the public on Tuesdays and Fridays. Elephant, rhinoceros, hippopotamus; extraordinary animals! Rubens rendered them marvelously. 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. What an immense variety of animals and species of different shapes and functions!

Authorities are the ruination of great talents, and form almost the entire talent of mediocrities. They are the leading strings with which everyone learns to walk at the beginning of their careers, but they almost always leave a permanent mark. People like Ingres never get them out of their systems and never take a step without invoking their help. It is as though they wished to eat bread and milk all their lives (Monday 10th October 1853)

A mere cast taken from nature will always be more real than the best copy a man can produce, for can anyone conceive that an artist’s hand is not guided by his mind…his strange task will not be tinged with the colour of his spirit?...For the word realism to have any meaning all men would need to be of the same mind and to conceive things in the same way. For what is the supreme purpose of every form of art if it be not the effect? (22 February 1860)

Beavers will invent a new way of building dams before architects accept a new method or a new style in their art (23 August 1854).

It doesn’t do to leave one’s work, that is why time and nature, and indeed everything that labours slowly and ceaselessly, produces such good results, but we, whose work is constantly being interrupted, never spin the same thread from beginning to end. Before I left Paris I was producing the work of M. Delacroix, as he was a fortnight ago, now I am about to being the work of the present M. Delacroix (Wednesday 12 May 1852).

Pourquoi ne pas profiter des contrepoisons de la civilisation, les bons livres.

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.

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.

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.

Les artistes qui cherchent la perfection en tout sont ceux qui ne peuvent l'atteindre en aucune partie.

The so-called conscientiousness of the great majority of painters is nothing but perfection laboriously applied to the art of being boring.

Curiously enough, the Sublime is generally achieved through want of proportion.

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.