Eugene Delacroix: Thoughts on Painting, Poetry, Ideas, Modesty and Love.

http://www.wikiart.org/en/theodore-gericault/portrait-of-eugene-delacroix-1819

Delacroix's friend and frequent correspondant, Theodore Gericault.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Th%C3%A9odore_G%C3%A9ricault
"...Jean-Louis André Théodore Géricault (French: [ʒɑ̃ lwi ɑ̃dʁe teodoʁ ʒeʁiko]; 26 September 1791 – 26 January 1824) was an influential French painter and lithographer, known for The Raft of the Medusa and other paintings. Although he died young, he was one of the pioneers of the Romantic movement..."

Self-portrait by Theodore Gericault.


Eugene Delacroix on Painting and Poetry:
"How is one to make something that is complete, condensed and yet flowing? Painting and poetry, it's all the same with the same frustrations. You have to go back to it often with fresh tools. You need a fearless eye which will span abysses wihtout flinching. It's not enough for the springs of imagination to be active and fertile: you need a firm and subtle mind, concentrated and yet able to expand, to bear the weight of invention, to sustain it throughout abd develop it without brushing off that evanescent bloom that colours thought while it is still thought, and which fades so rapidly when thought has assumed its visible and conrete form."

On Love:
"The more one has loved, the bitterer are one's tears."

On Heart's desires:
"...one is not responsible for one's heart's inclinations, any more than for its position between a pair of lungs for which, equally, one is not responsible."

On love for one's friends:
"...departures are like deaths. When friends part, the hope of seeing one another again counts for nothing. You clihng to that last moment when you still enjoy the sight of the one you love. There is one idea that always grieves me: I know that my friend exists and yet he does not exist for me."

On ideas:
"When I think I've caught a glimpse of some idea within myself, I try to pursue it, and I cannot bring myself to say anything commonplace, inessential to my thought."

On Modesty:
"You speak of my 'treasures' as though you yourself are very poor. Is this a result of that so-called virtue, modesty? What is modesty, after all? Does it consist in failing to recognise one's own merits, in not feeling them? That at least is rare. Or in not impressing others with one's superiority, in not boasting of it? That is surely true modesty, if such a thing exists at all. I start from this point to examine myself in all sincerity of heart, and to try to discern what I really think of myself."

Eugene Delacroix: Thoughts of a young artist.

On the choice of occupation: "You remind me that I shall be returning to occupations that I enjoy. That's true: they are delightful, compared with those of a clerk, but for that very reason their charm loses its keenness and one becomes insensitive to it. The thing is a recreation in itself; you see what I'm trying to say. I don't deny that it is very boring to be concerned, as you say, with writs, notifications and injunctions. But unfortunately it's the lot of the vast majority of men to devote their lives to things that mean nothing to them and that have nothing in common with their hearts and minds."

On growing older: "Passionate hearts, and above all those that are filled with the love of one or other of those arts that are the soul's sustenance, souls such as these do not grow old and dessicated."

On writing letters: "Truly, the way people write is a touchstone. The most affected man involuntarily shows himself in his true colours, while another who may seem cold in ordinary life reveals springs of ardent feeling in his letters."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eug%C3%A8ne_Delacroix

"...Eugène Delacroix was born on 26 April 1798 at Charenton-Saint-Maurice in Île-de-France, near Paris. His mother was named Victoire, daughter of the cabinet-maker Jean-François Oeben. He had three much older siblings. Charles-Henri Delacroix (1779–1845) rose to the rank of General in the Napoleonic army. Henriette (1780–1827) married the diplomat Raymond de Verninac Saint-Maur (1762–1822). Henri was born six years later. He was killed at the Battle of Friedland on 14 June 1807.[5]

There is reason to believe that Eugène's father, Charles-François Delacroix, was infertile at the time of Eugène's conception and that his real father was Talleyrand, who was a friend of the family and successor of Charles Delacroix as Minister of Foreign Affairs, and whom the adult Eugène resembled in appearance and character.[6] Throughout his career as a painter, he was protected by Talleyrand, who served successively the Restoration and king Louis-Philippe, and ultimately as ambassador of France in Great Britain, and later by Talleyrand's grandson, Charles Auguste Louis Joseph, duc de Morny, half-brother of Napoleon III and speaker of the French House of Commons. His presumed father, Charles Delacroix, died in 1805, and his mother in 1814, leaving 16-year-old Eugène an orphan.

His early education was at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand, and at the Lycée Pierre Corneille in Rouen[7] where he steeped himself in the classics and won awards for drawing. In 1815 he began his training with Pierre-Narcisse Guérin in the neoclassical style of Jacques-Louis David. An early church commission, The Virgin of the Harvest (1819), displays a Raphael-esque influence, but another such commission, The Virgin of the Sacred Heart (1821), evidences a freer interpretation.[8] It precedes the influence of the more colourful and rich style of the Flemish painter Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640), and fellow French artist Théodore Géricault (1791–1824), whose works marked an introduction to Romanticism in art...."

From "Eugene Delacroix: Selected Letters, 1813-1863 (Artworks) Paperback, by Eugene Delacroix (Author), Jean Stewart (Editor), John Russell (Contributor)

http://www.amazon.com/Eugene-Delacroix-Selected-1813-1863-Artworks/dp/B008SLJ4I2

Eugene Delacroix: The artistic past returns to haunt those of the present - Tasso.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eug%C3%A8ne_Delacroix

"...Ferdinand Victor Eugène Delacroix (French: [ø.ʒɛn də.la.kʁwa]; 26 April 1798 – 13 August 1863) was a French Romantic artist regarded from the outset of his career as the leader of the French Romantic school.[1] Delacroix's use of expressive brushstrokes and his study of the optical effects of colour profoundly shaped the work of the Impressionists, while his passion for the exotic inspired the artists of the Symbolist movement. A fine lithographer, Delacroix illustrated various works of William Shakespeare, the Scottish writer Walter Scott and the German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.

In contrast to the Neoclassical perfectionism of his chief rival Ingres, Delacroix took for his inspiration the art of Rubens and painters of the Venetian Renaissance, with an attendant emphasis on colour and movement rather than clarity of outline and carefully modelled form. Dramatic and romantic content characterized the central themes of his maturity, and led him not to the classical models of Greek and Roman art, but to travel in North Africa, in search of the exotic.[2] Friend and spiritual heir to Théodore Géricault, Delacroix was also inspired by Lord Byron, with whom he shared a strong identification with the "forces of the sublime", of nature in often violent action.[3]

However, Delacroix was given to neither sentimentality nor bombast, and his Romanticism was that of an individualist. In the words of Baudelaire, "Delacroix was passionately in love with passion, but coldly determined to express passion as clearly as possible."..."

"Tasso in the Hospital of St Anna at Ferrara" by Eugène Delacroix.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torquato_Tasso
"...Torquato Tasso (Italian: [torˈkwaːto ˈtasso]; 11 March 1544 – 25 April 1595) was an Italian poet of the 16th century, best known for his poem La Gerusalemme liberata (Jerusalem Delivered, 1581), in which he depicts a highly imaginative version of the combats between Christians and Muslims at the end of the First Crusade, during the siege of Jerusalem. He suffered from mental illness and died a few days before he was due to be crowned as the king of poets by the Pope. Until the beginning of the 20th century, Tasso remained one of the most widely read poets in Europe...."

From "Eugene Delacroix, Selected letters. 1813-1863." Selected and translated by Jean Stewart. artWorks. ISBN 0-87846-632-0. MFA Publications. Copyright 1970.

"...How tremendously interesting the life of Tasso is! What misfortunes that man endured! How indignant one feels with those shameful patrons who oppressed him under pretext of protecting him against his enemies, and who deprived him of his beloved manuscripts! What tears of rage and indignation he must have shed on seeing that in order to make sure of keeping them from him, his patrons declared him mad and incapable of creating!...One weeps for him; one moves restlessly in one's chair while reading his story; one's eyes gleam threateningly, one clenches one's teeth involuntarily...."

Eugene Delacroix: Thoughts on artistic perfection.

http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/e/eugene_delacroix.html

Biography
Nationality: French
Type: Artist
Born: April 26, 1798
Died: August 13, 1863

Eugene Delacroix: Thoughts on boredom.

From "Eugene Delacroix, Selected letters. 1813-1863." Selected and translated by Jean Stewart. artWorks. ISBN 0-87846-632-0. MFA Publications. Copyright 1970.

From his letter to Felix Guillemardet, September 1818.

"...It's a cruel thing that in this sad world one cannot enjoy any happinesss without, by contrast, experiencing some painful feeling. In this way one spends the whole of one's life posessing nothing completely, and in perpetual pursuit of a stability which is beyond man's reach. I think the happiest man is he whose soul is well filled and whose mind is occupied. The soul indeed is forever reaching out, unsatisfied, longing for objects as boundless as itself: but its enjoyments are all the sweeter..."

Thoughts of Artists and Creatives.

Ellen 0:)
Ellen F. Walker