I allow no one to touch me.
I am the primitive of the method I have invented.
My age and health will never allow me to realize the dream of art I’ve been pursuing all my life.
My nervous system is enfeebled, only work in oils can sustain me.
People think how a sugar basin has no physiognomy, no soul. But it changes every day.
Two sittings a day of my models and I’m totally exhausted.
You say a new era in art is preparing; you sensed it coming; continue your studies without weakening. God will do the rest.
Doubtless there are things in nature which have not yet been seen. If an artist discovers them, he opens the way for his successors.
The world doesn’t understand me and I don’t understand the world, that’s why I’ve withdrawn from it.
I’ll always be grateful to the public of intelligent amateurs.
Everything vanishes, falls apart, doesn’t it? Nature is always the same but nothing in her that appears to us lasts. Our art must render the thrill of her permanence, along with her elements, the appearance of all her changes. It must give us a taste of her Eternity.
I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s not really possible to help others.
What I am trying to translate to you is more mysterious, it is entwined in the very roots of being, in the implacable source of sensations.
Everything in nature is formed upon the sphere, the cone and the cylinder. One must learn to paint these simple figures and then one can do all that he may wish.
It is impossible for emotion not to come on us in thinking of that time now flowed away.
I am a pupil of Pissarro.
A puny body weakens the soul.
I ask you to pray for me, for once age has overtaken us, we find consolation only in religion.
One had to immerse oneself in one’s surroundings and intensely study nature or one’s subject to understand how to recreate it.
There is no light painting or dark painting, but simply relations of tones.