Eugene Delacroix Quotes
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The source of genius is imagination alone.
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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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Mediocre people have an answer for everything and are astonished at nothing. They always want to have the air of knowing better than you what you are going to tell them; when, in their turn, they begin to speak, they repeat to you with the greatest confidence, as if dealing with their own property, the things that they have heard you say yourself at some other place. A capable and superior look is the natural accompaniment of this type of character.
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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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Do all the work you can; that is the whole philosophy of the good way of life.
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Real beauty in the arts is eternal and would be accepted at all periods; but it wears the dress of its century: something of that dress clings to it, and woe to the works which appear in periods when the general taste is corrupted.
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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.
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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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Even when we look at nature, our imagination constructs the picture.
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Seeing artistically does not happen automatically. We must constantly develop our powers of observation.
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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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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.
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The living model never answers well the idea or impressions the painter wishes to express; one must, therefore, learn to do without one, and for that, you must acquire facility, furnish one's memory to the point of infinitude, and make numerous drawings after the old masters.
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Draughtsmen may be made, but colourists are born.
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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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Nature creates unity even in the parts of a whole.
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Cold exactitude is not art; ingenious artifice, when it pleases or when it expresses, is art itself.
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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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The so-called conscientiousness of the majority of painters is only perfection applied to the art of boring.
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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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Perhaps the sketch of a work is so pleasing because everyone can finish it as he chooses.
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The secret of not having worries, for me at least, is to have ideas.
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Experience has two things to teach. The first is that we must correct a great deal and the second, that we must not correct too much.
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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.