We’ve been right in the midst of magic, for as Fromentin says so well, Rembrandt is above all a magician and Delacroix a man of God, of God’s thunder and bugger off in the name of God.
Tag: Rembrandt
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ResetAh... Rembrandt.... all admiration for Baudelaire aside — I venture to assume, especially on the basis of those verses.... that he knew more or less nothing about Rembrandt. I’ve just found and bought here a little etching after Rembrandt, a study of a nude man, realistic and simple; he’s standing, leaning against a door or column in a dark interior. A ray of light from above skims his down-turned face and the bushy red hair. You’d think it a Degas for the body, true and felt in its animality. But see, have you ever looked closely at ‘the ox’ or the interior of a butcher’s shop in the Louvre? You haven’t looked closely at them, and Baudelairer infinitely less so.
You were fortunate to meet Guy de Maupassant — I’ve just read his first book, Des vers, poems dedicated to his master, Flaubert. There’s one, ‘Au bord de l’eau’, that’s already him. So you see, what Vermeer of Delft is beside Rembrandt among painters, he is among French novelists beside Zola.
Gauguin and I talk a lot about Delacroix, Rembrandt &c. The discussion is excessively electric. We sometimes emerge from it with tired minds, like an electric battery after it’s run down.