Top 81 Eugene Delacroix Quotes
#1. Artists who seek perfection in everything are those who cannot attain it in anything.
Eugene Delacroix
#2. Curiously enough, the Sublime is generally achieved through want of proportion.
Eugene Delacroix
#4. A fine suggestion, a sketch with great feeling, can be as expressive as the most finished product.
Eugene Delacroix
#5. 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.
Eugene Delacroix
#6. Cold exactitude is not art; ingenious artifice, when it pleases or when it expresses, is art itself.
Eugene Delacroix
#8. A picture is nothing but a bridge between the soul of the artist and that of the spectator.
Eugene Delacroix
#9. The contour should come last, only a very experienced eye can place it rightly.
Eugene Delacroix
#11. Mythological subjects always new. Modern subjects difficult because of the absence of the nude and the wretchedness of modern costume.
Eugene Delacroix
#12. 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.
Eugene Delacroix
#13. Every time I await a model, even when I am most pressed to time, I am overjoyed when the time comes and I tremble when I hear the key turn in the door.
Eugene Delacroix
#14. 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.
Eugene Delacroix
#15. The artist who aims at perfection in everything achieves it in nothing.
Eugene Delacroix
#16. When all is said and done scholars can do no more than find in nature what is already there.
Eugene Delacroix
#17. 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.
Eugene Delacroix
#18. Always, at the back of your soul, there is something that says to you, 'Mortal, drawn from eternal life for a short time, think how precious these moments are.
Eugene Delacroix
#19. It is often we come the closest to the essence of an artist ... in his or her pocket notebooks and travel sketchbooks ... where written comments and personal notes provide an intimate insight into the magical mind of a working artist.
Eugene Delacroix
#21. Painters who are not colorists produce illumination, not painting.
Eugene Delacroix
#22. 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.
Eugene Delacroix
#23. Criticism is like many other things, it drags along after what has already been said and doesn't get out of its rut.
Eugene Delacroix
#24. Take hold of objects by their centres, not by their lines of contour ... The contour accentuated uniformly and beyond proportion, destroys plasticity, bringing forward those parts of an object which are always most distant from the eye - namely its outlines.
Eugene Delacroix
#25. One always has to spoil a picture a little bit, in order to finish it.
Eugene Delacroix
#28. What drives men of genius is their obsession with the idea that what has already been done is not good enough.
Eugene Delacroix
#29. 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.
Eugene Delacroix
#30. At a distance this fine oak seems to be of ordinary size. But if I place myself under its branches, the impression changes completely: I see it as big, and even terrifying in its bigness.
Eugene Delacroix
#31. 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.
Eugene Delacroix
#32. Not only can color, which is under fixed laws, be taught like music, but it is easier to learn than drawing, whose elaborate principles cannot be taught.
Eugene Delacroix
#33. 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.
Eugene Delacroix
#35. 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!
Eugene Delacroix
#36. The so-called conscientiousness of the majority of painters is only perfection applied to the art of boring.
Eugene Delacroix
#38. Do not be troubled for a language, cultivate your soul and she will show herself.
Eugene Delacroix
#39. 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.
Eugene Delacroix
#40. Nourish yourself with grand and austere ideas of beauty that feed the soul Seek solitude.
Eugene Delacroix
#41. One should not be too difficult. An artist should not treat himself like an enemy.
Eugene Delacroix
#42. If one considered life as a simple loan, one would perhaps be less exacting. We possess actually nothing; everything goes through us.
Eugene Delacroix
#43. Cold exactitude is not art ... The so-called consciousness of the majority of painters is only perfection applied to the art of boring. People like that, if they could, would work with the same minute attention on the back of their canvas.
Eugene Delacroix
#44. 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.
Eugene Delacroix
#45. 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.
Eugene Delacroix
#48. 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.
Eugene Delacroix
#50. Glory to that Homer of painting, to that father of warmth and enthusiasm ... he really paints men.
Eugene Delacroix
#51. Men of genius are made not by new ideas, but by an idea which possesses them, namely, that what has been said has not yet been sufficiently said.
Eugene Delacroix
#52. What moves those of genius, what inspires their work, is not new ideas, but their obsession with the idea that what has already been said is still not enough.
Eugene Delacroix
#53. God is that inner presence which makes us admire the beautiful and consoles us for not sharing the happiness of the wicked.
Eugene Delacroix
#54. A wife of your own stature is the greatest of all blessings.
Eugene Delacroix
#55. How can this world, which is so beautiful, include so much horror?
Eugene Delacroix
#56. Seeing artistically does not happen automatically. We must constantly develop our powers of observation.
Eugene Delacroix
#58. [Photography is] in some ways false just because it is so exact.
Eugene Delacroix
#59. Talent does whatever it wants to do. Genius does only what it can.
Eugene Delacroix
#60. What is real for me are the illusions I create with my paintings. Everything else is quicksand.
Eugene Delacroix
#62. Even when we look at nature, our imagination constructs the picture.
Eugene Delacroix
#63. 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.
Eugene Delacroix
#64. 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.
Eugene Delacroix
#66. The secret of not having worries, for me at least, is to have ideas.
Eugene Delacroix
#67. The only ones who can really benefit by consulting the model are those who can produce their effect without a model.
Eugene Delacroix
#68. The things one experiences alone with oneself are very much stronger and purer.
Eugene Delacroix
#69. As for the ridiculous fear of making things below one's potential abilities ... No, there is the root of the evil. There is the hiding place of stupidity I must attack: vain mortal, you are limited by nothing ...
Eugene Delacroix
#70. 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.
Eugene Delacroix
#71. The more an object is polished or brilliant, the less you see its own color and the more it becomes a mirror reflecting the color of its surroundings.
Eugene Delacroix
#72. 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.
Eugene Delacroix
#73. I go to work as others rush to see their mistresses, and when I leave, I take back with me to my solitude, or in the midst of the distractions that I pursue, a charming memory that does not in the least resemble the troubled pleasure of lovers.
Eugene Delacroix
#74. Perhaps the sketch of a work is so pleasing because everyone can finish it as he chooses.
Eugene Delacroix
#75. To be understood a writer has to explain almost everything.
Eugene Delacroix
#76. Experience alone can give, even to the greatest talent, that confidence in having done all that could be done.
Eugene Delacroix
#77. The artist is always concerned with a total view of the world. However, when the photographer takes a picture ... the edge of his picture is just as interesting as the middle, one can only guess at the existence of a whole, and the view presented seems chosen by chance.
Eugene Delacroix
#78. 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.
Eugene Delacroix
#79. Do all the work you can; that is the whole philosophy of the good way of life.
Eugene Delacroix
#80. The outcome of my days is always the same; an infinite desire for what one never gets; a void one cannot fill; an utter yearning to produce in all ways, to battle as much as possible against time that drags us along, and the distractions that throw a veil over our soul.
Eugene Delacroix
#81. It is only possible to speak in the language and in the spirit of one's time.
Eugene Delacroix
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