Journal of Eugène Delacroix
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Eugène Delacroix (1798-1863) Jacob Wrestling Angel (1861) |
Delacroix's Self-Portrait (1837) Musée du Louvre, Paris |
Worked with frenzy the whole day, until after three o'clock. I couldn't break away from it.
I pushed ahead the grisaille of the Moroccan Mounting his Horse, the Fight Between a Lion
and a Tiger, the small Woman of Algiers with a Greyhound, and applied color to the cartoon
of the Hamlet Killing Polonius.
Taking a walk after such a spell of work is a real delight. The weather is still very fine. I simply
have to refrain from enjoying the landscape in the morning, except from my windows; going out for even a
short time distracts my mind from work and condemns me to boredom for the rest of the day, on account of
the difficulty of getting back afterward into a working mood.
Painters who simply reproduce their studies in their pictures will never give to the spectator a lively
feeling of nature. The spectator is moved because nature reappears in his memory even while he is looking
at your picture. It is necessary for your picture already to have received its properties of grace and
idealization, if the ideal, which recollection implants whether we like it or not in our memory of all
things, is not to find you inferior to what it regards as a representation of nature.
In the evening, took a walk with Jenny. The sight of the stars shining through the trees gave me the idea
of doing a picture in which I might use that highly poetic effect; it is difficult in painting because it
makes the whole canvas dark: it might be appropriate for a Flight into Egypt. Saint Joseph leading
the donkey and throwing the light of his lantern on the water of a little ford; that weak illumination would
suffice in the matter of the contrasts; or again the Shepherds going to adore Christ in the Stable,
its doors wide open; and seen from a distance; or again the Caravan of the Magi.
The complement of memory is needed if enjoyment is to be perfect, and unfortunately one cannot at the same
time enjoy and recall enjoyment. That is the ideal added to the real. Memory extracts the moment of delight
or creates the necessary illusion.
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! Truth is described to us as naked: I can conceive that only for abstract truth; but every truth in
the arts comes about through means in which the hand of man is felt, and consequently with the form agreed
on and adopted in the time when the artist lives.
The Journal of Eugène Delacroix
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Top of Page
| Delacroix's Illumination
| Delacroix Paintings: CGFA (15)
| WebMuseum, Paris (19)
| The Artchive (30)
| Olga's Gallery (54)
| OCAIW (95)
"The Other Side of Delacroix" (International Herald Tribune 4-18-1998)
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"From Saints to Sunsets: Works of Delacroix " (Smithsonian Sept. 1998)
"Delacroix: French Romantic Art"
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"Delacroix: Portrait of a Master" (Art Lovers' Paris)
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"Delacroix: Classicist or Romanticist"
Delacroix Biography (National Gallery of Art)
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Delacroix Biography (Catholic Encyclopedia)
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Delacroix Biography (Encarta Encyclopedia)
Selections from Delacroix's Journal
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Painting and the Journal of Eugene Delacroix
| Delacroix Museum, Paris
| Delacroix on the Internet
| Home
© Peter Y. Chou, WisdomPortal.com P.O. Box 390707, Mountain View, CA 94039 email: (10-12-2001) |