Occupation: Artist Birth: February 25, 1841 Death: December 3, 1919
If you paint the leaf on a tree without using a model, your imagination will only supply you with a few leaves; but Nature offers you millions, all o….
You haven't time to think about the composition. In working directly from nature, the painter ends up by simply aiming at an effect, and not composin….
I arrange my subject as I want it, then I go ahead and paint it, like a child..
The most important element in a picture cannot be defined..
I've known painters who never did any good work because instead of painting their models they seduced them..
You've got to be a fool to want to stop the march of time..
In painting, as in the other arts, there's not a single process, no matter how insignificant, which can be reasonably made into a formula. You come t….
What seems most significant to me about our movement is that we have freed painting from the importance of the subject. I am at liberty to paint flow….
If the professional schools should succeed in producing skilled workers trained in the technique of their craft, nothing could be done with them if t….
If it [dabbling in art] didn't amuse me, I beg you to believe that I wouldn't do it..
Do not think that it is possible to repeat another period..
Go and see what others have produced, but never copy anything except nature. You would be trying to enter into a temperament that is not yours and no….
When I've painted a woman's bottom so that I want to touch it, then [the painting] is finished..
The advantage of growing old is that you become aware of your mistakes more quickly..
I like a painting which makes me want to stroll in it..
With all their damned talk of modern painting, I've been forty years discovering that the queen of all colours is black!.
And if out of a million visitors there is even one to whom art means something, that is enough to justify museums..
White does not exist in nature..
There are quite enough unpleasant things in life without the need to manufacture more..
You don't talk about paintings, you look at them..
He bores me. He ought to have stuck to his flying machine. [On Leonardo Da Vinci].