I do have a dream, a painting, the baths of La Grenouillere for which I've done a few bad rough sketches, but it is a dream. Renoir, who has just spent two months here, also wants to do this painting.
I have always worked better alone and from my own impressions.
What I need most of all is color, always, always.
I am installed in a fairylike place. I do not know where to poke my head; everything is superb, and I would like to do everything, so I use up and squander lots of color, for there are trials to be made.
I'm in fine fettle and fired with a desire to paint.
I pass my time in the open air on the beach when it is really heavy weather or when the boats go out fishing.
It is better to have done something than to have been someone.
There, the grand lines of mountain and sea are admirable, and apart from the exotic vegetation that is here, Monte Carlo is certainly the most beautiful spot of the entire coast: the motifs there are more complete, more picturelike, and consequently easier to execute.
Perhaps it's true that I'm very hard on myself, but that's better than exhibiting mediocre work… too few were satisfactory enough to trouble the public with.
I wear myself out and struggle with the sun. And what a sun here! It would be necessary to paint here with gold and gemstones. It is wonderful.
I haven't many years left ahead of me and I must devote all my time to painting, in the hope of achieving something worthwhile in the end, something if possible that will satisfy me.
It is a tragedy that we live in a world where physical courage is so common, and moral courage is so rare.
I'm never finished with my paintings; the further I get, the more I seek the impossible and the more powerless I feel.
Critic asks: ‘And what, sir, is the subject matter of that painting?' – ‘The subject matter, my dear good fellow, is the light.
For a long time, I have hoped for better days, but alas, today it is necessary for me to lose all hope. My poor wife suffers more and more. I do not think it is possible to be any weaker.
It's on the strength of observation and reflection that one finds a way. So we must dig and delve unceasingly.
I am working, but when one has ceased to do seascape, it is the devil afterward - very difficult; it changes at every instant, and here the weather varies several times in the same day.
Eventually, my eyes were opened, and I really understood nature. I learned to love at the same time.
Finally here is a beautiful day, a superb sun like at Giverny. So I worked without stopping, for the tide at this moment is just as I need it for several motifs. This has bucked me up a bit.
Every day I discover more and more beautiful things. It's enough to drive one mad. I have such a desire to do everything, my head is bursting with it.
People discuss my art and pretend to understand as if it were necessary to understand, when it's simply necessary to love.
These landscapes of water and reflection have become an obsession.
Etretat is becoming more and more amazing. Now is the real moment: the beach with all its fine boats; it is superb, and I am enraged not to be more skillful in rendering all this. I would need two hands and hundreds of canvases.
I had so much fire in me and so many plans.
I am following Nature without being able to grasp her, I perhaps owe having become a painter to flowers.
Color is my day-long obsession, joy and torment.
I will do water - beautiful, blue water.
The point is to know how to use the colors, the choice of which is, when all's said and done, a matter of habit.
My wish is to stay always like this, living quietly in a corner of nature.
All I did was to look at what the universe showed me, to let my brush bear witness to it.
I have never had a studio, and I do not understand shutting oneself up in a room. To draw, yes; to paint, no.
No one is an artist unless he carries his picture in his head before painting it, and is sure of his method and composition.
Try to forget what objects you have before you - a tree, a house, a field, or whatever. Merely think, 'Here is a little square of blue, here an oblong of pink, here a streak of yellow,' and paint it just as it looks to you, the exact color and shape, until it gives you your own impression of the scene before you.
The richness I achieve comes from Nature, the source of my inspiration.
I'm not performing miracles, I'm using up and wasting a lot of paint.
It is extraordinary to see the sea; what a spectacle! She is so unfettered that one wonders whether it is possible that she again become calm.
I would like to paint the way a bird sings.
Among the seascapes, I am doing the regattas of Le Havre with many figures on the beach and the outer harbor covered with small sails.
I perhaps owe having become a painter to flowers.
Everyone discusses my art and pretends to understand, as if it were necessary to understand, when it is simply necessary to love.
I must have flowers, always, and always.
My life has been nothing but a failure.
My work is always better when I am alone and follow my own impressions.
I was definitely born under an evil star. I have just been thrown out of the inn where I was staying, naked as a worm.
