| (...) Of the lesson of Delacroix, on which this century lived, what will remain tomorrow? Mr. Pierre Girieud, craftsman of a rebirth of the classic spirit, counts among the clairvoyant admirers of the Master. He fully agrees with M. Rene Piot on the nature of the new lesson still offered to painting by one of his greatest masters. Reply of Pierre Girieud: "The irony is that we are going to celebrate Eugène Delacroix on the occasion of the centenary of Romanticism." Those who decipher his thought in his painted work have read with astonishment in his journal that his art seemed strong to him. Amaury-Duval confirms this fact by referring to a conversation he had with Delacroix: when he attended a Berlioz concert, he said to him: "I have often been compared to him, but I have not deserved neither this excess of honor nor this indignity. "
His contemporaries have confused the natural passion of an exceptional temperament with a disordered will. The cupola of the Library of the Senate, in my opinion its most complete work, makes it possible to affirm that it is the equal of the greatest artists of the Renaissance, not only of Tintoret which it evokes the memory, but of Raphael same .
The principles of order: hierarchy, subordination, propriety, are the most beautiful virtues of his compositions (it is useless to speak of the painter on whom today, everyone agrees).
Paradoxical as it may seem, nineteenth-century decorators, from Chasseriau to Puvis de Chavannes and up to the present day, to Maurice Denis, pondered his lesson. It was he, indeed, who again knew how to put in honor the great emotional feeling in the wall decoration, which was neglected by Le Brun and his successors who, misunderstanding the Italians and Rubens, thought only of the arrangement of lines and colors.
It singularly exceeds Romanticism; but, since this opportunity is offered to us, let us celebrate our greatest French painter."
Reproduction of Praise to Naked Beauty p.330 |