This kind of painting with its large frames is a bourgeois drawing-room art. It is an art dealer's art-and that came in after the civil wars following the French Revolution.

My breakthrough came very late in life, really only starting when I was 50...I had the strength for new deeds and ideas.

I don’t believe in an art that is not born out of man’s need to open his heart.

My fear of life is necessary to me, as is my illness. Without anxiety and illness, I am a ship without a rudder. My art is grounded in reflections over being different from others. My sufferings are part of my self and my art. They are indistinguishable from me, and their destruction would destroy my art. I want to keep those sufferings

In common with Michelangelo and Rembrandt I am more interested in the line, its rise and fall, than in color

Painting picture by picture, I followed the impressions my eye took in at heightened moments. I painted only memories, adding nothing, no details that I did not see. Hence the simplicity of the paintings, their emptiness.

A person himself believes that all the other portraits are good likenesses except the one of himself.