Eugene Delacroix on Art and Painting

Eugene Delacroix: Painting and Poetry

" I see in painters prose writers and poets. Rhyme, measure, and the turning of verses, which is indispensable and which gives them so much vigor, are analogous to the hidden symmetry, to the equilibrium at once wise and inspired, which governs the meeting or separation of lines and spaces, the echoes of colour, etc."

Eugene Delacroix: Perfection is Not Art

" I have told myself a hundred times that painting - that is to say, the material thing called painting - was no more than the pretext, the bridge between the mind of the painter and that of the spectator. Cold exactitude is not art; ingenious artifice, when it pleases or when it expresses, is art itself."

Eugene Delacroix: Colour is the Probity of Art

" All painting worthy of the name, unless one is talking about black-and-white, must include the idea of colour as one of its necessary supports, in the same way that it includes chiaroscuro and proportion and perspective. Proportion applies to sculpture as to painting; perspective determines the contour; chiaroscuro gives relief through the disposition of lights and shadows in their relationship with the background; colour gives the appearance of life, etc."

Eugene Delacroix: Art is Not Imitation

" Continual caution in showing only what is shown in nature will always make the painter colder than the nature which he thinks he is imitating; moreover, nature is far from being always interesting from the standpoint of effect and of ensemble. If each detail offers a perfection which I shall call inmitable, these details collectively, on the other hand, rarely present an effect equivalent to the one which results, in the work of the great artist, from the feeling for the ensemble and the composition. "

Eugene Delacroix: Preserving Inspiration

" The original idea, the sketch, which is so to speak the egg or embryo of the idea, is usually far from being complete; it contains everything, which is simply a mixing together of all parts. Just the thing that makes of this sketch the essential expression of the idea is not the suppression of details, but their complete subordination to the big lines which are, before all else, to create the impression."

 

Source
Goldwater, R & Treves, M. 1976. Artists on Art, From the 14th to the 20th Century . John Murray.

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