Baudelaire critique d'art never ceases to be a poet: "It will happen often," he writes, "to appreciate a painting only by the sum of ideas or dreams that it will bring into my mind."In other words, he describes as he wanders, with a keen perception that only makes possible a perfect availability to the contemplated work. It is in this capacity that he encenses Delacroix, "painter essentially literary", and mocks the hard line of the drawing of Ingres. This connivance between painting and poetry takes many forms: from the classical relationship of an exhibition to the definition of "philosophical art", to a praise in good standing of dandysm or makeup, his writings on art bear witness to an ever-moving, careless thought of genres and hierarchies, fertilised by the correspondences it detects.