I could paint for a hundred years, a thousand years without stopping and I would still feel as though I knew nothing.
Don’t be an art critic. Paint. There lies salvation.
I am more a friend of art than a producer of painting.
One does not substitute oneself for the past, one merely adds to it a new link.
To paint is not to copy the object slavishly, it is to grasp a harmony among many relationships.
All pictures painted inside in the studio will never be as good as the things done outside.
There is no model, there is only color.
If isolation tempers the strong, it is the stumbling-block of the uncertain.
Nature is more depth than surface, the colours are the expressions on the surface of this depth; they rise up from the roots of the world.
Optics, developing in us through study, teach us to see.
In order to make progress, there is only nature, and the eye is turned through contact with her.
Here on the edge of the river, the motifs are very plentiful, the same subject seen from a different angle gives a subject for study of the highest interest and so varied that I think I could be occupied for months without changing my place, simply bending a little more to the right or left.
Taste is the best judge. It is rare. Art only addresses itself to an excessively small number of individuals.
Get to the heart of what is before you and continue to express yourself as logically as possible.
Pure drawing is an abstraction.
The transposition that a painter makes with an original vision gives to the representation of nature a new interest.
I owe you the truth in painting, and I will tell it to you.
Talks on art are almost useless. The work which goes to bring progress in one’s own subject is sufficient compensation for the incomprehension of imbeciles.
See how the light tenderly love the apricots, it takes them over completely, enters into their pulp, light them from all sides! But it is miserly with the peaches and light only one side of them.
Yes, a bunch of carrots, observed directly, painted simply in the personal way one sees it, worth more than the Ecole’s everlasting slices of buttered bread, that tobacco-juice painting, slavishly done by the book? The day is coming when a single original carrot will give birth to a revolution.