Art isn’t something you marry. It’s something you rape. - Edgar Degas

I always urged my contemporaries to look for interest and inspiration to the development and study of drawing, but they would not listen. They thought the road to salvation lay by the way of colour.

Your pictures would have been finished a long time ago if I were not forced every day to do something to earn money.

I am busy on a portrait of my self and my aunt and my two cousins, I will show it to you when you get back. I am doing it as if I were doing a picture. I've got to do it well, because I want to leave it as a memento.... The older one is really a lovely thing, the younger one has the devil in her as well as the kindness of an angel. I am doing them with their black dresses and little white pinafores which suit them delightfully. I have ideas for the picture's background running through my head. I would like a certain gracefulness with a nobleness of feeling that I don't know how to describe.