It is not my aim and object to paint a cow for the cow's sake or a tree for the tree's, but by means of the whole to create a beautiful and huge impr… - Gerard Bilders

I always have the most sympathy for that painting of mine, which the other people appreciate the least. It gives me the impression of an outcast and it takes on a romantic-interesting quality. I therefore always put this work first and want to prove to everyone that he is wrong if he does not appreciate this above all my other works. It is certainly rather foolish, and I do not know, it comes from an 'esprit de contradiction' or just from pity. The bad end has something attractive, one has sympathy for it.

.I don't love less the gray waters of my Holland, their serious and somewhat sad color, which corresponds so well with the similar gray skies and vapors that are hanging there. (translation from the Dutch original: Fons Heijnsbroek)

I have seen pictures [on the Salon of Brussel, 1860], of which I had never dreamed and in which I found all that my heart desires, all that I nearly always miss in the Dutch painters. Troyon, Courbet, Diaz, Dupré [all painters of the School of Barbizon, Robert Fleury have made a great impression on me. I am a good Frenchman, therefore; but, as Simon van den Berg says, it is just because I am a good Frenchman that I am a good Dutchman, since the great Frenchmen of today and the great Dutchmen of the past have much in common. Unity, restfulness, earnestness and, above all, an inexplicable intimacy with nature are what struck me most in these pictures. There were certainly also a few good Dutch pieces, but, generally speaking, when you place them next to the great Parisians, they lack that mellowness, that quality which, so to speak, resembles the deep tones of an organ. And yet this luxurious manner came originally from Holland, from our steaming, fat-coloured Holland! They were courageous pictures; there was a heart and a soul in them.