Eugene Delacroix Art Quotations

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.

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.

The first virtue of a painting is to be a feast for the eyes.

Artists who seek perfection in everything are those who can't attain it in anything.

In every art we are always obliged to return to the accepted means of expression, the conventional language of the art. What is a black-and-white drawing but a convention to which the beholder has become so accustomed that with his mind's eye he sees a complete equivalent in the translation from nature?

Cold exactitude is not art; ingenious artifice, when it pleases or when it expresses, is art itself.

The source of genius is imagination alone, the refinement of the senses that sees what others do not see, or sees them differently.

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.

The so-called conscientiousness of the majority of painters is only perfection applied to the art of boring.