[Venice is] somewhat disguised by the artists who usually paint Venice, who have disfigured it by turning it into a city heated by the brightest and … - Eugène Louis Boudin

The peasants have their painters, Millet, Jaque, Breton; and that is a good thing.. ..Well and good: but between you and me, the bourgeois walking along the jetty towards the sunset, has just as much right to be caught on canvas, 'to be brought to the light'.. .They too are often resting after a day's hard work, these people who come from their offices and from behind their desks.. .There's a serious and irrefutable argument.

[I have] done various series of seascapes in different genres, beaches which demonstrated if not great art at least a reasonably faithful reproduction of the people of our age.

I have a confession to make. When I came back to.. ..the beach at Trouville.. ..it seeemed nothing more than than a frightful masquerade.. ..If you have passed one month among the people condemned to hard work in the fields, with black bread and water, and you then find that gang of golden parasites with such a triumphant air, you can't help feeling a bit of pity.. ..Fortunately, dear friend, the Creator has spread a little of his splendid and warming light everywhere, and what I reproduce is not so much this world as the element that envelops it.