The Thames was all gold. God it was beautiful, so fine that I began working a frenzy, following the sun and its reflections on the water.
These landscapes of water and reflections have become an obsession. It’s quite beyond my powers at my age, and yet I want to succeed in expressing what I feel.
No, I’m not a great painter. Neither am I a great poet.
I think only of my painting, and if I were to drop it, I think I’d go crazy.
Nature won’t be summoned to order and won’t be kept waiting. It must be caught, well caught.
When I look at nature I feel as if I’ll be able to paint it all, note it all down, and then you might as well forget it once you’re working...
I’ve always refused requests even from friends to employ a technique I know nothing about.
If the world really looks like that I will paint no more!
Take clear water with grass waving at the bottom. It’s wonderful to look at, but to try to paint it is enough to make one insane.
One can do something if one can see and understand it...
I know that to paint the sea really well, you need to look at it every hour of every day in the same place so that you can understand its way in that particular spot; and that is why I am working on the same motifs over and over again, four or six times even.
It would be asking too much to want to sell only to connoisseurs – that way starvation lies.
Lots of people will protest that it’s quite unreal and that I’m out of my mind, but that’s just too bad.
I do what I can to convey what I experience before nature and most often, in order to succeed in conveying what I feel, I totally forget the most elementary rules of painting, if they exist that is.
Never, even as a child, would I bend to a rule.
The only merit I have is to have painted directly from nature with the aim of conveying my impressions in front of the most fugitive effects.
I’m quite content: although what I’m doing is far from being as I should like, I am complemented often enough all the same...
Listening only to my instincts, I discovered superb things.
I never draw except with brush and paint...
I’m not lacking for enthusiasm as you can see, given that I have something like 65 canvases covered with paint and I’ll be needing more since the place is quite out of the ordinary; so I’m going to order some more canvases...