I am thinking of painting for the coming Salon a picture [probably the large and unfinished painting 'Botzaris' by Delacroix] whose subject I shall t… - Eugène Delacroix

I must try to live austerely, as Plato did.. .I need to live a more solitary life.. .Valuable ideas beyond number miscarry because I have no continuity in my thoughts.. ..The things which we experience for ourselves when we are on our own are stronger by far, and fresher... [his painting 'The Massacre at Chios' was half done when he wrote this note].

One has to see a painter in his own place to get an idea of his worth. I went back there [to Corot's studio, after the official exhibition] and I appreciate in a new light the paintings that I had seen in the Museum and that had struck me as middling.. .He told me to go a bit ahead of myself, abandoning myself to whatever might come; this is how he works most of the time.. .Corot delves deeply into a subject; ideas come to him and he adds while working; it's the right approach.

In every art we are always obliged to return to the accepted means of expression, the conventional language of the art. What is a black-and-white drawing but a convention to which the beholder has become so accustomed that with his mind's eye he sees a complete equivalent in the translation from nature?