Aesthetic truth is not exactitude.

This is a follow-up to Exactitude is not truth. Cold exactitude is not art. In that January post I looked at sources for a quote from Matisse that turned out to be taken from Delacroix.

My excellent York University colleague Philippe Theophanidis collects quotes and those two caught his eye. (Browse around his site Aphelis and you’ll see a lot of great quotes, and much more.) He found that the interview with Henri Matisse by Jacques Guenne in L’Art Vivant (15 September 1925) was published as a small book in 2020 (see its entry in the BNF catalogue), and he bought a copy. Many thanks to him for doing this and for what he discovered!

In it, “« L’exactitude n’est pas la vérité », se plaisait à dire Delacroix” has a footnote:

« La vérité esthétique n’est pas l’exactitude », formule apparue dans un article élogiuex de Léon Peisse, Le Constitutionnel, 8 juillet 1849, à propos de Delacroix.

In English something like this:

“Aesthetic truth is not exactitude,” a phrase that appears in a laudatory article by Léon Peisse, Le Constitutionnel, July 8, 1849, about Delacroix.

That issue of Le Constitutionnel is available in Gallica, the digital library of the Bibliothèque nationale de France! Philippe tracked it down and located the quote exactly.

A piece on the Salon of 1849 (an important year in the history of this annual exhibition) begins on the first page, with the first line “Heureuse et belle carrière d’artiste, que celle de M. Eugène Delacroix!” (Laudatory indeed: “A happy and beautiful artistic career, that of M. Eugène Delacroix!”) The review carries over to the bottom of the second page, and at the beginning in a discussion of two paintings of fruits and flowers we find:

Je m’inquiète peu de savoirs quels sont ces fruits et ces fleurs; c’est l’affaire du botaniste et de l’horticulteur; il me suffit de voir que ce sonts des fleurs et des fruits, et les plus beaux fruits et fleur du monde. C’est errer toto cœlo que de s’attacher en ceci à la pure imitation de ce qu’on appelle la nature. La vérité esthétique n’est pas l’exactitude.

In English this is something like:

I care little to know what these fruits and flowers are; that is the business of botanist and the horticulturist; it is enough for me to see that these are flowers and fruits, and the most beautiful fruits and flowers in the world. It is an error toto cœlo [utterly] to attach oneself in this to the pure imitation of what is called nature. Aesthetic truth is not exactitude.

The two paintings in question are first Basket of Flowers, now at the Met in New York:

And second Basket of Flowers and Fruit, now at the Philadelphia Museum of Art:

(Sources on Wikipedia: Basket of Flowers and Basket of Flowers and Fruit.)

So here we have art critic Léon Peisse saying in 1849, in a review of a work by Delacroix:

La vérité esthétique n’est pas l’exactitude. Aesthetic truth is not exactitude.

The next year Delacroix writes in his journal:

La froide exactitude n’est pas l’art. Cold exactitude is not art.

In 1925 Matisse says to an interviewer that Delacroix liked to say:

L’exactitude n’est pas la vérité. Exactitude is not truth.

Delacroix had it best.

(Unfortunately I can’t read what Edgar Degas wrote about Delacroix here: Note ayant trait à l’œuvre “Fruits et fleurs” d’Eugène Delacroix (from the archives of the Musée d’Orsay).) The heading says it was bought from Brame fils for 1600 francs on 26 December 1898.

UPDATE (18 March 2026): But Philippe Theophanidis could, and found which work it’s about:

Je ne sais pourquoi je ne mordais pas à ce tableau, Rouart ne voulait le prendre que déjà n’en voulais pas et il faisait tout ce qu’il pouvait pour me pousser dessus. Enfin comme il y renonça définitivement pour lui, je l’achetai 1600, et, une fois chez moi, je me rendis compte qu’il est admirable, que je n’y voyais goutte, et que le bon Rouart m’avait fait un fameux cadeau. Brame fils aurait pu le vendre beaucoup plus cher, lui aussi m’a fait un cadeau.

This is something like:

I don’t know why I wasn’t biting on this painting. Rouart didn’t want to take it since he already didn’t want it, and he was doing everything he could to push me toward it. Finally, as he definitively gave up on it for himself, I bought it for 1600, and once at home, I realized it’s admirable, that I hadn’t seen anything in it at all, and that good Rouart had made me quite a gift. Brame fils could have sold it much more dearly; he too made me a gift.

Degas’s Wikipedia article mentions his large art collection and references this quote on p. 37 from Degas by Robert Gordon and Andrew Forge (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1988):

His most important holdings were of his three idols, Ingres, Delacroix, and Daumier. In the final inventory of his collection, there were twenty paintings and eighty-eight drawings by Ingres, thirteen paintings and almost two hundred drawings by Delacroix. There were hundreds of lithographs by Daumier.

This work he bought is not one of the two above, and it seems it’s not even really by Delacroix. The Private Collection of Edgar Degas: A Summary Catalogue (Metropolitan Museum of New York, 1997) (PDF) has it as “attributed to Pierre Andrieu” (who had worked for Delacroix, and, it appears, was known for his copies and possibly forgeries of Delacroix’s work).

4. Still Life with Fruit and Flowers

ca. 1850–64

Oil on canvas, 65.8 × 81 cm

Acquired from Hector Brame, Dec. 26, 1898, for 1,600 fr., as “French school”; had been described by Degas as a work by Delacroix.

The painting is at the National Gallery in London, but not currently on display. The catalogue record for Still Life with Fruit and Flowers says:

The painting was thought to be the work of Eugène Delacroix, but it is has now been attributed to Pierre Andrieu, his most trusted assistant, and holds its own with a place in the National Gallery’s collection. At the studio sale following Delacroix’s death, Andrieu was in possession of the wax seal that was fixed to the back of this picture – perhaps accidentally, perhaps intentionally – and that authenticated it as by Delacroix.