No art is less spontaneous than mine. What I do is the result of reflection and the study of the great masters.

A picture is first of all a product of the artist's imagination, it must never be a copy.

The frame is the reward of the artist.

What a delightful thing is the conversation of specialists! One understands absolutely nothing and it's charming.

The museums are here to teach the history of art and something more as well, for, if they stimulate in the weak a desire to imitate, they furnish the strong with the means of their emancipation.

A picture is a thing which requires as much knavery, as much malice, and as much vice as the perpetration of a crime. Make it untrue and add an accent of truth.

You have to have a high conception, not of what you are doing, but of what you may do one day: without that, there's no point in working.