"..The so-called classical school, men of a rare perfection in their science, understood nothing of this art - an art bursting from the painter's heart, with a passion which sometimes made it rise to the most impregnable altitudes, yet which sometimes, by its very exaggeration, brought it down again to the ground. For the works of Delacroix have their weak passages, I admit, because they are human works, because they are not born of cold calculations of the mind, and because the vexations of the painter, in following his ideal, pierce through them."
Eugène Delacroix

January 1, 1970