Great Throughts Treasury

"We must not paint what we think we see, but what we see... sometimes it may go against the grain, but this is what our craft demands."

"When a picture isn't realized, you pitch it in the fire and start another."

"When color has its greatest richness, then form has its plenitude."

"When the color achieves richness, the form attains its fullness also."

"When they [paintings] are done right, harmony appears by itself. The more numerous and varied they are, the more the effect is obtained and agreeable to the eye."

"Will I ever attain the end for which I have striven so much and so long? A vague sense of malaise persists."

"Yes, a bunch of carrots, observed directly, painted simply in the personal way one sees it, worth more than the Ecole?s (French Classical Art Academy, ed.) 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."

"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."

"What is one to think of those fools who tell one that the artist is always subordinate to nature? Art is a harmony parallel with nature."

"You can?t ask a man to talk sensibly about the art of painting if he simply doesn?t know anything about it. But by God, how can dare to say that a painter is done because he has painted one bad picture? When a picture isn?t realized, you pitch it in the fire and start another one."

"Whoever the master is whom you prefer, this must only be a directive for you. Otherwise you will never be anything but an imitator."

"With a painter's temperament, all that's needed are the means of expression sufficient to be intelligible to the wide public."

"Wouldn?t it be wonderful to paint a nude there? There are innumerable motifs here on the banks of the river; the same spot viewed from a different angle offers a subject of the utmost interest. It is so varied that I think I could keep busy for months without changing my place, simply turning now tot the right and now to the left."

"You [Vincent van Gogh] positively paint like a madman."

"You say a new era in art is preparing; you sensed it coming; continue your studies without weakening. God will do the rest."

"You wretch. You?ve spoiled the pose. Do I have to tell you again you must sit like an apple? Does an apple move?"

"You must think. The eye is not enough; it needs to think as well."

"You have no idea how life-giving it is to find around one a youth that agrees not to bury one on the spot."