Eugene Delacroix Quotes
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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!
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Talent does whatever it wants to do. Genius does only what it can.
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The only ones who can really benefit by consulting the model are those who can produce their effect without a model.
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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.
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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.
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Nourish yourself with grand and austere ideas of beauty that feed the soul Seek solitude.
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Curiously enough, the Sublime is generally achieved through want of proportion.
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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?
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We work not only to produce, but to give value to time.
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All painting worth its name, unless one is talking about black and white, must include the idea of color as one of its necessary supports, in the same way that it includes chiaroscuro, proportion, and perspective.
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I have told myself a hundred times that painting - that is, the material thing called a painting - is no more than a pretext, the bridge between the mind of the painter and the mind of the spectator.
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Let a man of genius make use of photography as it should be used, and he will raise himself to a height that we do not know.
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The source of genius is imagination alone, the refinement of the senses that sees what others do not see, or sees them differently.
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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.
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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.
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A picture is nothing but a bridge between the soul of the artist and that of the spectator.
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Finishing a painting demands a heart of steel: everything requires a decision, and I find difficulties where I least expect them... It is at such moments that one fully realizes one's own weaknesses.
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If you are not skillful enough to sketch a man jumping out of a window in the time it takes him to fall from the fourth storey to the ground, you will never be able to produce great works.
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I am carrying out my plan, so long formulated, of keeping a journal. What I most keenly wish is not to forget that I am writing for myself alone. Thus I shall always tell the truth, I hope, and thus I shall improve myself. These pages will reproach me for my changes of mind.
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Remember the enemy of all painting is gray: a painting will almost always appear grayer than it is, on account of its oblique position under the light.
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Even when we look at nature, our imagination constructs the picture.
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Nature is a dictionary; one draws words from it.
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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.
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The first virtue of a painting is to be a feast for the eyes.