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| GERICAULT |
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Theodore Gericault
"I am a monster, you know it well."
"My desires are always insatiable, and whatever I do, it is always something other than what I wanted."
"I search vainly for support; nothing is solid, everything escapes me, everything deceives me. Our hopes and our desires are truly only vain chimeras, and our successes, only phantoms that we believe to have seized. If there is to be one certain thing that we can be sure of on this world, it is our pain. Suffering is real; pleasures are only imaginary."
"If only I could have made five paintings, but I have created nothing, absolutely nothing."
"It is the best argument for Beauty as it ought to be understood."- Eugene Delacroix on Gericault's paintings of body fragments
"The wretches who write such foolishness have certainly never starved for fourteen days, because only then would they know that neither poetry nor painting are able to render with enough horror all the anguish of the men on the Raft."- Gericault on the critics of his painting The Raft of the Medusa
"The Medusa. Bah! A vignette!...It is not worth the pain of being looked at."
"Their vain anger will not shake me. I have come to port for a long time now, without passion, as without rivalry."
"Your youth will also pass, my young friend. Goodbye."- Gericault to Eugène Isaby
"I figure that your soul will come to hover above my work sometimes. Goodbye poor young man. At least your suffering has ended."- Eugene Delacroix upon hearing of Gericault's death
"He wanted to die. Nature listened, and death, death slow and cruel, gave him time to savor all the pains of a great unfinished destiny."- Jules Michelet on Gericault
"Shall we always be our own judges? And won't our works, mixed in the galleries with others, one day proclaim our vanity and presumption?"
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