Must I say that I prefer Delacroix with his exaggerations, his mistakes, his obvious falls, because he belongs to no one but himself, because he represents the spirit, the time, and the idiom of his time? Sickly, too highly strung, perhaps, since his art has the melodies of our generation, since in the strained note of his lamentations as in his resounding triumphs, there is always a gasp of the breath, a cry, a fever that are alike our own and his.
We are no longer in the Olympian Age, like Raphael, Veronese, and Rubens; and Delacroix's art is powerful, as a voice from Dante's Inferno.
Rousseau.
CCXXXIII
A DELACROIX EXHIBITION
Feminine painting is invading us; and if our time, of which Delacroix is the true representative, has not dared enough, what will the enervated art of the future be like?
Only paintings are exhibited just now. Two rooms scarcely hold his riches; and when one thinks that there are here but the elements of Delacroix's production, one is bewildered. What strikes one above all in
his sketches is the note of nervous, contained intensity, which during all his full career he never lost; neither fashion nor the influence of others affected it; never was there a more sincere note. Plenty of incorrectness, I grant you, but with a great feeling for drawing. Whatever one may say, if drawing is an instrument of expression, Delacroix was a draughtsman. A great style, a marvellous invention, passion expressed in form as well as in colour, Delacroix is typically the artist, and not a professor of drawing who fills out weakness and mediocrity by rhetoric.
Paul Huet.