..I have suddenly become a traveler, and I am afflicted with a fever for seeing Raphael's. So I am in the process of swallowing up Italy. Now, I will… - Pierre-Auguste Renoir

Nature abhors a vacuum, say the physicists. They could complete their axiom by adding that it has no less a horror of regularity.
Observers know in effect that in spite of the apparent simplicity of the laws which preside at their formulation, the works of nature are infinitely varied, from the most important to the least...
At this time when our French art, still at the beginning of this century so full of penetrating charm and exquisite fantasy, is perishing because of regularity, dryness, and the mania of false perfection that now tends to make the unadorned cleanliness of the engineer into the ideal, we think it is useful to react promptly against the mortal doctrines which threaten to annihilate it...

One morning one of us had run out of black; and that was the birth of Impressionism.

What I like so much about Corot is that he can say everything with a bit of tree; and it was Corot himself that I found [back] in the museum of Naples – in the simplicity of the work of Pompeii and the Egyptians. These priestesses in their silver-grey tunics are just like Corot's nymphs.