It is not enough for a painter to be a clever craftsman; he must love to ‘caress’ his canvas, too.

With all their damned talk of modern painting, I’ve been forty years discovering that the queen of all colours is black!

What I like so much about Corot is that he can say everything with a bit of tree; and it was Corot himself that I found in the museum of Naples – in the simplicity of the work of Pompeii and the Egyptians. These priestesses in their silver-grey tunics are just like Corot’s nymphs.

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 composing the picture at all; and he soon becomes monotonous.

I’ve never let one day go by without painting, or at least without drawing.

I want a red to be sonorous, to sound like a bell. If it doesn’t turn out that way, I add more reds and other colors until I get it.

The modern architect is, generally speaking, art’s greatest enemy.

I’ve known painters who never did any good work because instead of painting their models they seduced them.

It’s with my brush that I make love.

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 to nature with your theories, and she knocks them all flat.