 Gautier, who started off as a painter, contributed much to the world of art criticism.Instead of taking on the classical criticism of art that involved knowledge of color, composition and line, Gautier was strongly committed to Denis Diderot's idea that the critic should have the ability to describe the art such that the reader might "see" the art through his description.Many other critics of the generation of 1830 took on this theory of the transposition of art – the belief that one can express one art medium in terms of another.