CROIX 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._

CCXXXIV

COROT'S METHOD OF WORK

Corot is a true artist. One must see a painter in his home to have an
idea of his merit. I saw again there, and with a quite new appreciation
of them, pictures which I had seen at the museum and only cared for
moderately. His great "Baptism of Christ" is full of naive beauties; his
trees are superb. I asked him about the tree I have to do in the
"Orpheus." He told me to walk straight ahead, giving myself up to
whatever might come in my way; usually this is what he does. He does not
admit that taking infinite pains is lost labour. Titian, Raphael,
Rubens, &c., worked easily. They only attempted what they knew; only
their range was wider than that of the man who, for instance, only
paints landscapes or flowers. Notwithstanding this facility, labour too
is indispensable. Corot broods much over things. Ideas come to him, and
he adds as he works. It is the right way.

_Delacroix._

CCXXXV

From the age of six, I had the passion for drawing the forms of things.
By the age of fifty, I had published an infinity of designs; but all
that I produced before the age of seventy is of no account. Only when I
was seventy-three had I got some sort of insight into the real structure
of nature--animals, plants, trees, birds, fish, and insects.
Consequently, at the age of eighty I shall have advanced still further;
at ninety, I shall grasp the mystery of things; at a hundred, I shall be
a marvel, and at a hundred and ten