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..Africa: it's a magic word that lends itselfs to suppositions and sets amateur explorers to dreaming. I want to try to be 'at home' on this bit of foreign [Arab] soil.

— Eugène Fromentin

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Source: as quoted by Sarah Anderson, in Between Sea and Sahara: An Orientalist Adventure, Eugène Fromentin, (1859) - in 'Preface'; transl. Blake Robinson; publisher I.B. Tauris 2004, p. 4
Source quality: Secondhand citation Quoted from another book or article rather than from the original.

More by Eugène Fromentin

What motive had a Dutch painter in painting a picture? None. And notice that he never asked for one. A peasant with a drunken red nose looks at you with his heavy eye and laughs with open mouth showing his teeth, raising a jug; if it is well painted, it has its value.

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More quotes by Eugène Fromentin

..the great Dutch school seemed to think of nothing but painting well [characterised by] the total absence of what today we call 'a subject'.

..that zone of consciousness through which all artists travel mentally, before ever approaching the easel.

The things I haven't seen with my own eyes are for me unknown.

Interpreting the Orient through the arts would destroy it, the artistic exploitation might eventually prove as harmful as military or political adventurism.

The art of painting is only the art of expressing the invisible by the visible. Whether its roads be great or small, they are sown with problems which it is permitted to sound for one's self as truth, but which it is well to leave in their darkness as mysteries.

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Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Eugène Fromentin (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.