20 quotes
For his contemporaries, Racine was a romantic, but for every age he is classical, that is to say, he is faultless.
Delacroix' 'Journal (1847)
The so-called conscientiousness of the great majority of painters is nothing but perfection laboriously applied to the art of being boring.
Delacroix' 'Journal (1847)
Nature creates unity even in the parts of a whole.
Delacroix' 'Journal (1847)
Curiously enough, the Sublime is generally achieved through want of proportion.
Delacroix' 'Journal (1847)
Mythological subjects always new. Modern subjects difficult because of the absence of the nude and the wretchedness of modern costume.
Delacroix' 'Journal (1847)
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.
Delacroix' 'Journal (1847)
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.
The contour should come last, only a very experienced eye can place it rightly.
Delacroix' 'Journal (1822)
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.
Delacroix' 'Journal (1847)
Artists who seek perfection in everything are those who cannot attain it in anything.
Delacroix' 'Journal (1847)
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.
Harmony is music does not consist merely in the construction of concordant sounds, but in their mutual relations, their proper succession in what I should call their audible reflex.
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.
Delacroix' 'Journal (1847)
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.
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?
Delacroix' 'Journal (1847)
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.
Delacroix' 'Journal (1847)
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.
Delacroix' 'Journal (1847)
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.
Delacroix' 'Journal (1847)
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.
Delacroix' 'Journal (1847)
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.
Delacroix' 'Journal (1847)