The habit of breaking up one’s colour to make it brilliant dates from further back than Impressionism – Couture advocates it in a little book called ‘Causeries d’Atelier’ written about 1860 – it is part of the technique of Impressionism but used for quite a different reason.

I don’t dig beneath the surface for things that don’t appear before my own eyes.

You can’t do sketches enough. Sketch everything and keep your curiosity fresh.

A person with normal eyesight would have nothing to know in the way of ‘Impressionism’ unless he were in a blinding light or in the dusk or dark.

No small dabs of colour – you want plenty of paint to paint with.

Cultivate an ever-continuous power of observation. Wherever you are, be always ready to make slight notes of postures, groups and incidents.

I do not judge, I only chronicle.

An artist painting a picture should have at his side a man with a club to hit him over the head when the picture is finished.

Cultivate an ever continuous power of observation. Wherever you are, be always ready to make slight notes of postures, groups and incidents. Store up in the mind... a continuous stream of observations from which to make selections later. Above all things get abroad, see the sunlight and everything that is to be seen.

I hate to paint portraits! I hope never to paint another portrait in my life. Portraiture may be all right for a man in his youth, but after forty I believe that manual dexterity deserts one, and, besides, the color-sense is less acute. Youth can better stand the exactions of a personal kind that are inseparable from portraiture. I have had enough of it.