Eugene Delacroix
Eugene Delacroix
Ferdinand Victor Eugène Delacroixwas a French Romantic artist regarded from the outset of his career as the leader of the French Romantic school...
ProfessionPainter
Date of Birth26 April 1798
Eugene Delacroix quotes about
art mean eye
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?
believe intelligent track
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.
eye perspective lines
Take hold of objects by their centres, not by their lines of contour... The contour accentuated uniformly and beyond proportion, destroys plasticity, bringing forward those parts of an object which are always most distant from the eye - namely its outlines.
sight perfect simplicity
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.
pride men thinking
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.
distance perspective branches
At a distance this fine oak seems to be of ordinary size. But if I place myself under its branches, the impression changes completely: I see it as big, and even terrifying in its bigness.
eye men fire
There is a man whose qualities can be savored by people who are getting old... The painter qualities are carried to the highest point in his work: what he does is done - through and through; when he paints eyes, they are lit with the fire of life.
memories solitude mistress
I go to work as others rush to see their mistresses, and when I leave, I take back with me to my solitude, or in the midst of the distractions that I pursue, a charming memory that does not in the least resemble the troubled pleasure of lovers.
looks study paint
Everything is a subject; the subject is yourself. It is within yourself that you must look and not around you... The greatest happiness is to reveal it to others, to study oneself, to paint oneself continually in [one's] work.
taken done immortality
What I have done cannot be taken from me.
different would-be actors
If painters left nothing of themselves after their deaths, so that we were obliged to rank them as we do actors according to the judgment of their contemporaries, how different their reputations would be from what posterity has made them!
notebook artist essence
It is often we come the closest to the essence of an artist... in his or her pocket notebooks and travel sketchbooks... where written comments and personal notes provide an intimate insight into the magical mind of a working artist.
spirit language speak
It is only possible to speak in the language and in the spirit of one's time.
artist personality vagueness
In abandoning the vagueness of the sketch the artist shows more of his personality by revealing the range but also the limitations of his talent.