Painters From France

"I think I will go back to mahogany [wood, as layer for his paintings], the only stable wood, together with old oak. But mahogany is so heavy. And it has another drawback, it blackens even through the primers if they are not thick enough and applied in several coats."

"I am obsessed with the idea of leaving. I must travel, for that would probably relax me."

"[Venice is] somewhat disguised by the artists who usually paint Venice, who have disfigured it by turning it into a city heated by the brightest and hottest sun. On the contrary, Venice, like all luminous cities, has a grey hue, the atmosphere is mild and misty and the sky arrays itself with clouds, just like the sky of our Norman and Dutch regions."

"My God, you are a seraph, Boudin! You are the only one of us who really knows the sky!"

"I exhaust myself terribly to content the world, and never manage to content myself."

"Where many painters only found a pretext for larges surfaces of blue, opaque and dirty, Eugène Boudin astonishes us by a variety and an incomparable accuracy: for him each cloud has a physiognomy.. ..to give us the impression of immensity and to hold our attention, allured by the innovation of a spectacle which everyday we have under our eyes and which we had never seen."

"I could not appreciate his [Boudin's] paintings [Monet was c. 16 years old] and when he offered to take me with him to paint outdoors in the open countryside, I always found a pretext and refused politely. But when Summer came, I was more or less free to dispose of my time as I wished and I had no feasible excuse left to give him and gave in. Thus it was, that Boudin - with his inexhaustible kindness - took it upon himself to educate me. With time, my eyes began to open and I really started to understand nature. I also learned to love it. I would analyze its forms with my pencil. I would study its colorations."

"You know the affection I have always had for you and also the gratitude. I have never forgotten that you were the first who taught me to see and to comprehend."

"The peasants have their painters, Millet, Jaque, Breton; and that is a good thing.. ..Well and good: but between you and me, the bourgeois walking along the jetty towards the sunset, has just as much right to be caught on canvas, 'to be brought to the light'.. .They too are often resting after a day's hard work, these people who come from their offices and from behind their desks.. .There's a serious and irrefutable argument."

"I dare not think of the sun-drenched beaches and the stormy skies, and of the joy of painting them in the sea breezes."

"When I got back [from Le Havre], where I had made several sketches of the harbour exit, I thought of placing the sun in the background. I liked the picture so much that I painted it ten times over, with its three-master and its sun."

"The themes of childhood, love and joy underlie the works of both Claudel and Maillol – and like Claudel Maillol retained his purity of soul and his clarity of vision during his troubled years."

"These archaic ideas, Greek, were the great novelty Maillol brought into the tendency of modern sculpture. What you need to love from the ancients is not the antiquity, it is the sense of permanent, renewed novelty, that is due to the nature and reason."

"The immobility that the artist creates is not at all that of the photograph. A worth of art contains latent life, possibility of movement; a grimace made eternal does not represent life. One always talks of w:Donatello, but never of della Quercia. Yet della Qercia invented w:Michelangelo’s style before Michelangelo."

"[Maillol] represents plastic form in its essential massiveness, to allow it to stand resolutely and assertively in space. A torso by Maillol is a palpable reality; we may apprehend it visually, but the eye is not.. ..flattered."

"Like Claudel, Maillol has experienced doubt and despair and bitter disillusion.. ..but we who admire his works today forget the toil and suffering.. ..when we are in front of a piece of his work, we seem to share the.. ..joy which inspired his fingers when they touched the clay or the chisel."

"When Picasso does pure painting he is a great artist. When he paints as an cubist, putting one tone next to another, the arrangement of planes is fine and the result very strong. But those who imitate him achieve nothing worthwhile."

"For my taste, sculpture should have as little movement as possible. It should not fall, and gesture, and grimace, and if one depicts movement, grimaces come too easily. Rodin himself remains quiet; he puts movement into his rendering of muscles, but the whole remains quiet and calm."

"The more immobile Egyptian statues are, the more it seems as if they would move.. ..immobility of the body does not mean immobility of the flesh; in my model for the monument to Cézanne the whole figure is quiet, but there are several movements in the torso."

"Those who do Negro-sculpture in this country are wrong. We are in France; in the country of Ronsard, La Fontaine, and Racine. What connection is there between this country and these men, and Negro sculpture? An artist can only create in accordance with the character of his people and his time."

"We should try to return to our youth, to work naively; this is what I see, and it is why I have such success, because our century has tried to return to the primitive. I work as if no art had ever been made, before me, as if I had never learned anything. I am the first man to do sculpture."

"Negro art contains more ideas than Greek art. Its strange inventiveness of form is astonishing, and its imagination and extraordinary sense of decoration are difficult to explain. We dare not take such liberties; but the Negroes have succeeded. We are too much the subjects of our own past.."

"w:Donatello's art does not come out of nature, it belongs to the studio. He exaggerates to make it lifelike. His weeping children grimace frightfully.. .When movement is excessive it is frozen: it no longer represents life."

"Art is complex, I said to Rodin, who smiled because he felt that I was struggling with nature.. ..the beauty of Rodin’s art is.. ..in the thoughts he embodied. As for me, I just take a walk on the beach. A young girl appears. From that girl walking there emanates a soul. That is That is at I want to give my statue, that thing alive, yet immaterial. In composing the figure of one young girl I must give the impression that there are all young girls. From the spirit, my feeling passes into my fingers"

"I make [figures] in which I try to give an impression of the whole."

"A [figure] interests me when I can bring architecture out of it."

"The first thing that strikes [one] in Cézanne is not apples, but balance of tones. With elements drawn from nature, what did [Cézanne] attempt? To create, to arouse powerful feeling, to awaken in the hearts of men that which is eternal in men."

"Mademoiselle, I am told that you look like a Renoir and Maillol [as a model]. I would be happy with a Renoir."

"I seek beauty, not character. For me portraiture and statuary are completely opposed to each other."

"The particular does not interest me; I find meaning only in a general idea. In Michelangelo one is carried away by the idea of power, the whole single-minded concept he imposed on himself. The 'Slaves' and the 'Medici tombs' are sculpture made to be seen only from one side. For me, sculpture means the block; my figure of 'France' has more than twenty different sides. When I enlarged it only four were left, and I had to rework it.."

"My sculpture is altogether different from Rodin’s.. ..In sculpture he [Rodin] always sees the flesh first. [answering his critics]"

"I have a weakness for Egyptian sculpture: its figures are sculptured gods, sculptured ideas. Very different in expression, Hindu sculpture is based on very similar assumptions.. .The oriental people are much more artistic than we. When nations grow old, their art grows complicated and soft."

"He [ Renoir; Maillol made his bust] was very interested, watching me do his bust. He said to me: 'Every time you touch it, it becomes more alive.'"

"..that pure-hearted gentle knight. [after Bazille's death, 1870]"

"[Bazille had not died] romantically, galloping over a Delacroix' battlefield.. ..but stupidly, during the retreat, on a muddy road."

"the oeuvre of Frédéric Bazille is unclassifiable."

"He belongs.. ..,not as a talented beginner but as a master, to this history of the rebirth of French painting which restores the link between man, nature and light.. .He bears in his soul and in his art, mixed to his delicious charm and his painterly audacity, a sort of severe quality, a pride of retained youth he might hold from his protestant education."

"Bazille sets up his easel in direct sunlight to paint under the magical effects of daylight [in Bazille's painting: 'Scene d'Été', 1869]. There is an abyss between old and new.. ..the old feeling that captivated us in the work of the masters.. ..is here again, the figure lives in a breath-able air.. .Bazille has already mastered one element, an amazing comprehension of light, the particular impression of the open air, the power of daylight. Sun floods his canvases. In 'Baigneurs' [official title now: 'Scene d'Été'] the meadow is as though on fire. It is happy, it sings and plays. The eye feasts. We shall notice finesse in the shades of flesh, the two small wrestlers in the sun, and the man dressing near the trees, in the comforting heat of a beautiful summer afternoon."

"I have no intention of being killed, there's too much I still want to do with my life."

"The subject matter is unimportant, provided what I have done is interesting as a painting. I chose the modern era because it is the one I understand best; I find it more alive for people who are alive."

"My dear Bazille, I ask myself what you can be doing in Paris during fine weather, for I suppose that it must also be very fine there. Here [in Honfleur, Normandy], my dear fellow, it is charming, and I discover every day always beautiful things. It is enough to become mad [fou], so much do I have the desire to do it all, my head is cracking. Damn it, here it is the sixteenth, put aside your cliques and your claques, and come spend a couple of weeks here, it would be the best thing that you could do, because in Paris it cannot be very easy to work.. ..Are you making any progress? Yes, I am sure of it, but what I am sure of is that you do not work enough and not in the right way. It is not with carefree guys like your Villa and others that you will be able to work. It would be better all alone, and yet, all alone there are plenty of things that one cannot make out."

"I have almost finished a large landscape [painting 'Landscape by the Lez River' - [around Montpellier].. ..I am completely alone on the country; my cousins and my brother are at the resort. My father and mother are living in town; this solitude pleases me enormously; it makes me work a lot and read a lot."

"My dear Bazille, your painting 'La Femme' [ official title of his exhibited painting: 'View of the Village', 1868] has been accepted; I am glad to give you this good news. You were defended (between us) [in the jury of the Salon] by Bonnat, and guess who else? By Cabanel!"

"The tall fellow Bazille has done something I find quite fine [ in his exhibited painting 'View of the Village':] a young girl in a very light dress in the shadow of a tree beyond which one sees a town. There is a good deal of light, sunlight, He is trying to do what we [Berthe Morisot and her sister Edma both painted] have so often tried to bring off: to paint a figure in the open air [in the outdoor light]. This time I think he has succeed."

"I like that [Bazille's painting 'View of the Village', 1868] very much. Certainly it is original and new, very new.. .A young lady, dressed in white and hat-less is seated in the shade on a knoll, at the very bottom of the painting. She looks at you with an expression all the more vacuous because it scarcely accounts for a nuance of shy uneasiness.. .One hesitates at first between qualifying the work as eccentric or as naive. In the end one must recognize that all the boldness of composition and colour is absolutely true. The perspective, above all, particularly difficult, is as exact as seen through the lens of a 'camera lucida' or in a photograph. The color and effect.. ..equally impose themselves by their healthy sincerity."

"Monet has popped up out of nowhere with a collection of magnificent canvases.. .With Renoir, that makes two hard-up painters I am putting up. It's quite an infirmary here."

"Letter to his mother, February 1867; as quoted in Michel Schulmann, Frédéric Bazille, 1841-1870, Catalogue raisonné: peintures, dessins, pastels, aquarelles; sa vie, son oeuvre, sa correspondence, Paris, 1995, p. 354"

"It is really too ridiculous for a reasonably intelligent person to expose himself to this kind of administrative caprice."

"The sun allowed me only four days of work. Today it is beautiful and I am about to go out.. .I have begun three or four landscapes of the area around Aigues-Mortes. In my large canvas 'The Ramparts at Aigues-Mortes', I am going to do the walls of the city, reflected in a pond at sunset. This will be a very simple painting, which should not take long to do. Nevertheless I would need at least eight beautiful days. I hope that everything will be finished by the 12th [of June, 1867]"

"If I did not know how unhappy you [ Monet, his friend] are, I certainly would not take the trouble to respond to the letter that reached me this morning. You try to demonstrate to me that I don't keep my promises, but you have only succeeded in proving to me your ingratitude. As far as I know I had never had the air to give you charity. I know to the contrary, better than everyone, the value of the painting that I have purchased [Monet's painting 'Women in the garden' purchased by Bazille] and I very much regret not being wealthy enough to offer you better conditions. (WPJ 15)"