"What we've lost - 'I said in more or less these terms' - is the proper interest in and taste for detail. We've been noting that for a long time yet the loss is irremediable. In the old days man was everything. A human face was worth a poem. When nature appeared behind a human being it was a kind of backdrop taking the place of the dark background of portrait painters or the gold of the Italian primitives.. .The day when a separation took place art was diminished. It was transformed the day that the 'subject' and the 'genre' destroyed great painting, denaturing even landscapes."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
Quote of Fromentin, as cited by Sarah Anderson in Between Sea and Sahara: An Orientalist Adventure, 'Chapter IV', Eugène Fromentin, (1859); transl. Blake Robinson; publisher I.B. Tauris 2004, p. 4
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Eug%C3%A8ne_Fromentin
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
Eugène Fromentin
11 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by Eugène Fromentin →
Related Quotes
"The Algerians of Fromentin are much more real Arabs than those of his artist colleagues."
"..Africa: it's a magic word that lends itselfs to suppositions and sets amateur explorers to dreaming. I want to try …"
"The things I haven't seen with my own eyes are for me unknown."
"Interpreting the Orient through the arts would destroy it, the artistic exploitation might eventually prove as harmfu…"
"..that zone of consciousness through which all artists travel mentally, before ever approaching the easel."
"..an entirely original painter [ Francois Millet ], high-minded and genuinely rustic in nature, who has expressed thi…"
"..the great Dutch school seemed to think of nothing but painting well [characterised by] the total absence of what to…"
"What motive had a Dutch painter in painting a picture? None. And notice that he never asked for one. A peasant with a…"
"The art of painting is only the art of expressing the invisible by the visible. Whether its roads be great or small, …"
"Fromentin was more of a colorist with pen in hand but brush."