Great Throughts Treasury

"If I think, everything is lost."

"If I'd known how to organize my life, it would have suited me better. But a family forces one to make a lot of concessions."

"If isolation tempers the strong, it is the stumbling-block of the uncertain."

"If you see a red tree, paint it bright red."

"I'll always be grateful to the public of intelligent amateurs."

"I'm beginning to see the Promised Land. Will I be like the great Hebrew chief or will I be able to enter?"

"I'm beginning to consider myself stronger than all those around me, and the good opinion I have of myself has only been reached after mature consideration."

"I'm only a poor painter and doubtless the brush would be rather the means of expression put my heaven in my hands."

"Impressionism, what does it mean? It is the optical mixing of color? which are broken down on the canvas and reassembled by the eye."

"I'm too tired, too tired. I ought to be sensible, to stay at home, and do nothing but work."

"In order to make progress, there is only nature, and the eye is turned through contact with her."

"In that Renaissance (Cellini, Tintoretto, Titian) there was an explosion of unique truthfulness, a love of painting and form? ?Then come the Jesuits and everything is formal; everything has to be taught and learned. It required a revolution for nature to be rediscovered; for Delacroix to paint his beach at tratat, Corot his roman rubble, Courbet his forest scenes and his waves. And how miserable slow that revolution was, how many stages it had to go through! ?These artists had not yet discovered that nature has more to do with depth than with surfaces. I can tell you, you can do things to the surface? ? but by going deep you automatically go to the truth. You feel a healthy need to be truthful. You?d rather strip your canvas right down than invent or imagine a detail. You want to know."

"Is art really the priesthood that demands the pure in heart who belong to it wholly?"

"Is it the factitious and the conventional that most surely succeed on earth and in the course of life?"

"It is impossible for emotion not to come on us in thinking of that time now flowed away."

"It's always sad to renounce living as long as we are on earth."

"It's so fine and yet so terrible to stand in front of a blank canvas."

"I've come to the conclusion that it's not really possible to help others."

"I've had much work on hand, which is what happens to every man who is somebody."

"I've often made sketches of male and female bathers which I'd have liked to execute on a large scale."

"Keep good company - that is, go to the Louvre."

"Light is a thing that cannot be reproduced, but must be represented by something else ? by color."

"Literature expresses itself by abstractions, whereas painting, by means of drawing and color, gives concrete shape to sensations and perceptions."

"Mass and a douche are what keep me going."

"May I repeat what I told you here: treat nature by means of the cylinder, the sphere, the cone, everything brought into proper perspective so that each side of an object or a plane is directed towards a central point. Lines parallel to the horizon give breadth... lines perpendicular to this horizon give depth. But nature for us men is more depth than surface, whence the need to introduce into our light vibrations, represented by the reds and yellows, a sufficient amount of blueness to give the feel of air."

"Michelangelo is a constructor, and Rafael an artist who, great as he is, is always limited by the model. When he tries to be thoughtful he falls below the level of his great rival."

"Monet is only an eye, but my God what an eye!"

"Monet?s cliffs will survive as a prodigious series, as will a hundred others of his canvases... He?ll be in the Louvre, for sure, alongside Constable and Turner. Damn it, he?s even greater. He painted the iridescence of the earth. He?s painted water. Remember those Rouen cathedrals (Monet painted, fh)... But where everything slips away in these pictures of Monet's, nowadays we must insert a solidity, a framework.."

"My age and health will never allow me to realize the dream of art I've been pursuing all my life."

"My canvas ?joins hands?, it holds firm."

"My nervous system is enfeebled, only work in oils can sustain me."

"Nature is more depth than surface. Hence the need to introduce into our light vibrations represented by the reds and yellows, a sufficient amount of blue to give the impression of air."

"Nature is not on the surface; it is in the depths. Colors are an expression of these depths on the surface. They rise from the roots of the world."

"Nature is the best instructor."

"One can do good things without being very much of a harmonist or a colorist. It is sufficient to have a sense of art ? and this sense is doubtless the horror of the bourgeois."

"One does not substitute oneself for the past, one merely adds to it a new link."

"One had to immerse oneself in one's surroundings and intensely study nature or one's subject to understand how to recreate it."

"My nervous system is very much weakened ? nothing but painting in oil can keep me going."

"Nature as it is seen and nature as it is felt, the nature that is there? and the nature that is here both of which have to fuse in order to endure, to live that life, half human and half divine, which is the life of art or, if you will? the life of god. The landscape is reflected, humanized, rationalized within me. I objectives it, project it, fix it on my canvas."

"Optics, developing in us through study, teach us to see."

"Painting certainly means more to me than everything else in the world. I think my mind becomes clearer when I am in the presence of nature. Unfortunately, the realization of my sensations is always a very painful process with me. I can?t seem to express the intensity which beats in upon my senses. I haven?t at my command the magnificent richness of color which enlivens Nature?. ?Look at that cloud; I should like to be able to paint that! Monet could. He had muscle."

"Painting is damned difficult - you always think you've got it, but you haven't."

"Painting must give us the flavor of nature?s eternity. Everything, you understand. So I join together nature?s straying hands? From all sides, here there and everywhere, I select colors, tones and shades; I set them down, I bring them together? They make lines, they become objects ? rocks, trees ? without my thinking about them? But if there is the slightest distraction, the slightest hitch, above all if I interpret too much one day, if I?m carried away today by a theory which contradicts yesterday?s, if I think while I?m painting, if I meddle, then whoosh!, everything goes to pieces."

"People think how a sugar basin has no physiognomy, no soul. But it changes every day."

"Perhaps I came too early. I am the primitive of a new art."

"Personally I would like to have pupils, a studio, pass on my love to them, work with them, without teaching them anything? ?A convent, a monastery, a phalanstery of painting where one could train together? ?but no program, no instruction in painting? ?drawing is still alright, it doesn?t count, but painting ? the way to learn is to look at the masters, above all at nature, and to watch other people painting."

"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."

"One must see one's model correctly and experience it in the right way; and furthermore express oneself forcibly and with distinction."

"One is neither too scrupulous nor too sincere nor too submissive to nature; but one is more or less master of one\'s model, and, above all, of the means of expression."

"Shaking off my torpor, I emerge from my shell and am going to make all efforts to follow up your invitations."