Paul Claudel’s Introduction to Dutch painting, printed in 1935, can be read as a significant departure from the dominant realistic view of Dutch painting, namely by Hegel, Tain and Thoré-Burger, and after. This work has received a strongly philosophical and aesthetical attention by Maurice Merlau-Ponty; Henry Maldiney and Gilles Deleuze, but a too little attention by history of art and art criticism, although Jan Bialostocki calls its author a sensitive interpreter. Following the long tradition of French writers of Salons─Diderot; Baudelaire, Zola and Fromentin─, very close to Valéry’s writings on paintings and relationship between verbal and visual, word and image, always in a critical way into the field of Mallarmé poetics, Claudel focuse...