Eugene Delacroix
Eugene Delacroix
Ferdinand Victor Eugène Delacroixwas a French Romantic artist regarded from the outset of his career as the leader of the French Romantic school...
ProfessionPainter
Date of Birth26 April 1798
marriage blessing wife
A wife of your own stature is the greatest of all blessings.
race wings soul
I live in company with a body, a silent companion, exacting and eternal. He it is who notes that individuality which is the seal of the weakness of our race. My soul has wings, but the brutal jailer is strict.
beauty looks taste
Of which beauty will you speak? There are many: there are a thousand: there is one for every look, for every spirit, adapted to each taste, to each particular constitution.
beauty sovereign conventions
What makes sovereign ugliness are our conventions.
different would-be actors
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!
nature unity parts-of-a-whole
Nature creates unity even in the parts of a whole.
nature children stupid
The true wisdom of the philosopher ought to insist in enjoying everything. Yet we apply ourselves to dissecting and destroying everything that is good in itself, that has virtue, albeit the virtue there is in mere illusions. Nature gives us this life like a toy to a weak child. We want to see how it all works; we break everything. There remains in our hands, and before our eyes, stupid and opened too late, the sterile wreckage, fragments that will not again make a whole. The good is so simple.
mistake inspiration school
Weaknesses in men of genius are usually an exaggeration of their personal feeling; in the hands of feeble imitators they become the most flagrant blunders. Entire schools have been founded on misinterpretations of certain aspects of the masters. 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.
humility long simplicity
A taste for simplicity cannot last for long.
photography men genius
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.
pride men thinking
There is no merit in being truthful when one is truthful by nature, or rather when one can be nothing else; it is a gift, like poetry or music. But it needs courage to be truthful after carefully considering the matter, unless a kind of pride is involved; for example, the man who says to himself, "I am ugly," and then says, "I am ugly" to his friends, lest they should think themselves the first to make the discovery.
taken done immortality
What I have done cannot be taken from me.
looks study paint
Everything is a subject; the subject is yourself. It is within yourself that you must look and not around you... The greatest happiness is to reveal it to others, to study oneself, to paint oneself continually in [one's] work.
ideas yellow orange
Everyone knows that yellow, orange, and red suggest ideas of joy and plenty. I can paint you the skin of Venus with mud, provided you let me surround it as I will.