Interpreting the Orient through the arts would destroy it, the artistic exploitation might eventually prove as harmful as military or political adven… - Eugène Fromentin

The art of painting is only the art of expressing the invisible by the visible. Whether its roads be great or small, they are sown with problems which it is permitted to sound for one's self as truth, but which it is well to leave in their darkness as mysteries.

What we've lost - 'I said in more or less these terms' - is the proper interest in and taste for detail. We've been noting that for a long time yet the loss is irremediable. In the old days man was everything. A human face was worth a poem. When nature appeared behind a human being it was a kind of backdrop taking the place of the dark background of portrait painters or the gold of the Italian primitives.. .The day when a separation took place art was diminished. It was transformed the day that the 'subject' and the 'genre' destroyed great painting, denaturing even landscapes.

What motive had a Dutch painter in painting a picture? None. And notice that he never asked for one. A peasant with a drunken red nose looks at you with his heavy eye and laughs with open mouth showing his teeth, raising a jug; if it is well painted, it has its value.