I ask you to pray for me, for once age has overtaken us, we find consolation only in religion.

Fruits ... like having their portrait painted. They seem to sit there and ask your forgiveness for fading. Their thought is given off with their perfumes. They come with all their scents, they speak of the fields they have left, the rain which has nourished them, the daybreaks they have seen.

What is one to think of those fools who tell one that the artist is always subordinate to nature? Art is a harmony parallel with nature.

Everything vanishes, falls apart, doesn't it? Nature is always the same but nothing in her that appears to us lasts. Our art must render the thrill of her permanence, along with her elements, the appearance of all her changes. It must give us a taste of her Eternity.

One had to immerse oneself in one's surroundings and intensely study nature or one's subject to understand how to recreate it.

I paint as if I were Rothschild.

I could paint for a hundred years, a thousand years without stopping and I would still feel as though I knew nothing.