Delacroix's timeless thoughts

"If painters left nothing of themselves after their deaths, so that we were obliged to rank them as we do actors according to the judgment of their contemporaries, how different their reputations would be from what posterity has made them! How many forgotten names must have created a stir in their own day, thanks to the vagaries of fashion or to the bad taste of their contemporaries! But luckily, fragile though it is, painting (and failing this, engraving) does preserve the evidence for the verdict of posterity, and allows the reputation of an artist of real superiority to be reassessed, even though he may have been underestimated by the shallow judgments of contemporary public opinion, which is always attracted by the flashiness and a veneer of truth."
"A great number of talented artists had never done anything worth while because they surrounded themselves with a mass of prejudices, or had them thrust upon them by the fashion of the moment. It is the same with their famous word beauty which, everyone says, is the chief aim of the arts. But if beauty were the only aim, what would become of men like Rubens and Rembrandt... who prefer other qualities?"
How times have changed... or have they?