Johan Jongkind

"My specialty is really painting moonlight – but I will not forget the sunshine."

"What I have suffered is unbelievable.. .I was given nothing [for his paintings in the Salon of 1855], not even a honorable mention."

"I miss my friends in Paris. Holland is fine to paint, but Paris is the only place to follow one's studies. One can find judges there who will encourage you, who wil tell one what is necessary and what is missing. My great hope is to return as soon as the weather and luck are on my side for he journey."

"I have another painting finished, a view near Rotterdam, and then another in process, and very far along. I made them from nature, that is to say I made watercolors [in open air] after which I made my [oil]-paintings."

"Eight days ago I left Paris and here I am at Honfleur, the place to which I return, as always, with new pleasure. It is a little seaport where there are ten or twenty ships of all nations; not counting the fishing vessels of the same nations. I tell you that this is very interesting for my studies."

"Monsieur Jongkind is a very fine Colorist. His slightly over-bright colors belong to him alone, his vividly sketched landscapes have great character, his paintings could be recognized among thousands. This is a fairly rare merit today. Monsieur Jongkind is opening up a very pretty part in art. It is not a royal highway, but where he walks by himself, without being elbowed out."

"You know that the only marine painter that we have, Jongkind, is dead to art. He is completely mad."

"Jongkind's craft hardly concerns him; and this results in the fact that, before his canvases, it does not concern you either. The sketch finished, the painting completed, you do not trouble yourself with the execution, it disappears before the power of the charm of the effect.."

"With him [Jongkind] all lies in impression."

"He works himself up into a frenzy, on order to make great strides, before returning to Paris."

"There at the moment in Honfleur.. ..Boudin and Jongkind are here; we get on marvelously.. .There's lots to be learned and nature begins to grow beautiful.."

"One must be particularly knowledgeable in order to render the sky and the land with this apparent disorder, here [in Jongkind's art, showed at the Salon of 1868] everything is true (French: 'vrai')."

"Jongkind is beginning to make us digest a kind of painting of which the hard outer skin hides an excellent and most tasty fruit. I too have profited by coming in the door which he already had forced, and I have begun, albeit timidly, tp present my seascapes.. ..the longer one looks at his watercolors, the more one wonders how he does them! They are made from nothing and yet the fluidity and the density of the sky and clouds are reproduced with unbelievable precision.. ..Nothing alters him, success, honours, fortunes, attacks or disdain. He sizes men up for himself; he knows that the disdained Corot is the master of landscape, that the insulted Monet will soon be the glory of his age; he knows how to assess the weakness in the art of Isabey or Troyon."

"[Jongkind].. ..his painting was too new and far too artistic to be appreciated in 1862 at his prices. Moreover, no one was as bad at making himself valued, as he was. He was a straight-forward and simple kind of man, who could hardly speak bad French and was very shy. But he was very outgoing that day [in 1864, somewhere around [[w:Le Havre| Le Havre] ]. He asked to see my sketches, invited me to come and work with him, explained the whys and wherefores underlining his work and thereby, completed the training that I had already received from Boudin. He became from this moment my true master and it [is] to him, that I owe the definitive training of my eyes."

"One of the most precious gifts he [Jongkind] owed Schelfhout was his initiation to quick sketching after nature, rendering the full aspect of a landscape through a wash of summary colours over a nervous and solidly constructed drawing."

"He painted them 'after life', but one has to agree on the definition of this phrase insofar as he was concerned. A painting by Jongkind 'after life' is not a straightforward copy of the motif he had settled on. It is the reproduction of the same subject treated through watercolour. His first sketch is a watercolour. It is with his watercolour brush that he captured directly the impression of nature"

"One must not forget that Boudin had received lessons from a master, Jongkind, whose oeuvre, especially in the watercolors, is the origin along with Corot of what has been called Impressionism."

"..in 1863 [Jongkind] begins the most beautiful series of watercolors that exists in the world."

"As he painted them [the sailing ships, in the harbor of Le Havre ] again that summer of 1865, Courbet and Whistler were his neighbours. At Deauville the robust Courbet reveled in swimming and was enjoying himself as usual. Whistler was with him. Courbet still spoke of him as his pupil, although Whistler had outgrown his influence."

"He has spent his childhood near a small port [Vlaardingen, near Rotterdam ]. The boats on the quayside, the proud three-masters leaving their home waters to sail the seas have always haunted his imagination and fed his imagination.. .His views of the river w:Scheldt, near Antwerp, painted during his most colorful period, are among his most memorable works."

"Watercolor provides him with an autonomous art-form, and attracts him with a charm, of which he is fully aware, and because of this he prepares all the means necessary to capture on paper the beauty of values, whether they be questions of color or of balance."

"Jongkind divides his colors more and more, puts them in juxtaposition, and by about 1875 he is on equal footing with Sisley, and later with Seurat."