I shall do other things, but I will always be the painter of beaches. - Eugène Louis Boudin

I am a loner, a daydreamer who has been content to remain in his part of the world and look at the sky. The future will treat me as it does all of us. I am very much afraid it may be oblivion.

When I got back [from Le Havre], where I had made several sketches of the harbour exit, I thought of placing the sun in the background. I liked the picture so much that I painted it ten times over, with its three-master and its sun.

Everything that is painted directly and on the spot always has strength, a power, and a vivacity of touch one cannot recover in the studio.. .Three strokes of the brush in front of nature are worth more than two days of work at the easel [in the studio].