[I have] done various series of seascapes in different genres, beaches which demonstrated if not great art at least a reasonably faithful reproductio… - Eugène Louis Boudin

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

I shall do other things, but I will always be the painter of beaches.

To swim in the open sky. To achieve the tenderness of clouds. To suspend these masses in the distance, very far away in the grey mist, make the blue explode. I feel all this coming, dawning in my intentions. What joy and what torment! If the bottom were still, perhaps I would never reach these depths. Did they do better in the past? Did the Dutch achieve the poetry of clouds I seek? That tenderness of the sky which even extends to admiration, to worship: it is no exaggeration.