Theophile Gautier Biography Quotes 19 Report mistakes

Early Life and Formation
Theophile Gautier was born in 1811 in Tarbes, in the south of France, and moved with his family to Paris in childhood. In the capital he received a solid classical education at the College Charlemagne and trained seriously in drawing and painting before turning decisively to literature. The visual habits of a young painter stayed with him: his prose and verse would always favor clarity of contour, precision of image, and an almost sculptural attention to form and surface. Among his earliest literary companions was Gerard de Nerval, whose friendship helped guide him into the vibrant Romantic circles of the late 1820s.

Romantic Paris and the Battle of Hernani
As an adolescent in Paris, Gautier gravitated to Victor Hugo, whose plays and poems galvanized a generation. The celebrated Battle of Hernani in 1830, a tumultuous premiere that signaled the Romantic revolt against classical conventions, made Gautier a public partisan of the new art; his bright red vest, worn to the theater that night, became a legend of youthful defiance. In these years he encountered writers and artists who defined the movement, including Alexandre Dumas, Honore de Balzac, and painters such as Eugene Delacroix. The cauldron of Romantic Paris formed his taste for color, sensuality, and the refusal of didactic art.

Poet and Novelist: Toward l art pour l art
Gautier made his name with early poems like Albertus (1832), a fantastical narrative that embraced the supernatural and the grotesque, and with the audacious novel Mademoiselle de Maupin (1835-1836). The famous preface to that novel argued, with lapidary force, that art serves no moral or utilitarian function: l art pour l art. He pursued this ideal in later volumes, among them La Comedie de la mort (1838) and the masterfully chiseled Emaux et Camees (1852), whose brief, polished pieces became a touchstone for the Parnassian poets. His fiction ranged widely in setting and tone: Fortunio offered exotic caprice; Arria Marcella evoked ancient Pompeii; Avatar and Spirite explored metamorphosis and the supernatural; and Le Roman de la momie transformed the fascination with Egypt into romantic archaeology. The grand adventure Le Capitaine Fracasse, published in the 1860s after long gestation, paid homage to the theatrical world of the seventeenth century while displaying his gift for vivid historical pastiche.

Critic and Journalist
To support himself and his household, Gautier became one of the most industrious critics of his time. Beginning in the 1830s he wrote regular columns for Parisian newspapers, notably La Presse under the innovative editor Emile de Girardin, and later for Le Moniteur universel. Week after week he delivered reviews of theater, ballet, literature, painting, and the annual Salon, cultivating a distinctive critical voice: precise, concrete, and generous to artists of strong temperament. He championed Delacroix and respected the linear purity of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, balancing opposites with a connoisseur s tact. His collected pages on the stage and the visual arts became an unofficial chronicle of cultural life under the July Monarchy and the Second Empire. Critics such as Sainte-Beuve, with whom Gautier sometimes disagreed in method and aim, nonetheless recognized the authority of his eye and the independence of his judgments.

Travel Writing and the Stage
Gautier was an indefatigable traveler and one of the nineteenth century s most graceful travel writers. Voyage en Espagne distilled impressions from his journeys on the Iberian Peninsula, catching bullfights, cathedrals, and landscapes with painterly exactness. He later published accounts of Constantinople and Russia, extending his descriptive range from Mediterranean light to northern snows and imperial ceremony. His eye for color and texture, trained in the studio and refined in the galleries, animated these books; they read like portfolios of moving pictures.

The theater and ballet were lifelong passions. His reviews made reputations, and he also created for the stage. He contributed the scenario for the ballet Giselle (1841), collaborating with Jules-Henri Vernoy de Saint-Georges on a story inspired in part by a page of Heinrich Heine; Adolphe Adam composed the music, and the young ballerina Carlotta Grisi created the title role. The fusion of spectral romance and peasant realism in Giselle mirrored Gautier s own blend of refinement and fantasy, and the ballet became a lasting monument of Romantic art.

Circle, Friendships, and Influence
Gautier s literary friendships spanned generations. With Victor Hugo he shared a Romantic beginning; with Gerard de Nerval he shared nocturnal wanderings and a taste for legend. He offered discerning encouragement to Charles Baudelaire, who dedicated Les Fleurs du mal to him in words that saluted Gautier as a perfect magician of French letters. The dedication acknowledged the elder writer s immaculately crafted verse and his doctrine of pure beauty, which helped prepare the way for the Parnassians, including Leconte de Lisle and, later, Jose-Maria de Heredia. Gautier also moved easily among artists and patrons; under the Second Empire he frequented influential salons, where painters, musicians, and writers exchanged ideas about style, costume, and staging that crossed the borders of their arts.

His personal life intertwined with the stage. He admired Carlotta Grisi and formed a lasting union with her sister Ernesta, with whom he had two daughters, including Judith Gautier, who became a notable writer in her own right and later married the poet Catulle Mendes. Family responsibilities anchored him to journalism and the steady grind of criticism, but they also placed him in the heart of Parisian cultural life, close to premieres, exhibitions, and rehearsals that supplied the raw material of his columns.

Later Years and Legacy
In the 1850s and 1860s Gautier stood as a central arbiter of taste. He revised and expanded Emaux et Camees, refined his prose style, and continued to alternate fiction with essays and travelogues. Though often proposed for institutional honors, he never entered the Academie francaise, a fact that underscored both the independence of his career and the cautious spirit of official taste. Toward the end of his life he accepted positions that afforded some stability, and he kept up an exacting schedule despite health troubles.

Gautier died in 1872, at Neuilly near Paris, and was buried in the Montmartre Cemetery. His reputation has endured less for any single book than for the consistency of a vision: the primacy of form; the conviction that beauty requires discipline; the defense of the artist s autonomy against moral and political demands. As poet, he left crystalline miniatures that shaped the technique of later schools; as novelist and tale-teller, he offered a gallery of romantic imaginings pursued with classical restraint; as critic, he provided an incomparable record of stages, salons, and studios. The friendship of Hugo and Nerval placed him at the birth of French Romanticism; the dedication of Baudelaire, and the admiration of younger poets, placed him at the threshold of modernity. In this double allegiance lay his originality: a Romantic sensibility schooled by a sculptor s chisel, a reporter s eye taught by the museum, and a craftsman s respect for the work itself.

Our collection contains 19 quotes who is written by Theophile, under the main topics: Witty One-Liners - Ethics & Morality - Love - Writing - Deep.

Other people realated to Theophile: Gustave Flaubert (Novelist), Alphonse Karr (Critic), Gerard De Nerval (Novelist)

• 1863 Le Capitaine Fracasse (Novel)
• 1858 Le Roman de la momie (Novel)
• 1852 Émaux et camées (Collection)
• 1836 La Morte amoureuse (Short Story)
• 1835 Mademoiselle de Maupin (Novel)
• 1830 Poésies (Poetry)