"I don't paint cows but light"

“a couple of days afterwards I was sitting somewhere and painting - when one of these braggarts came up behind me. Well, hey, when you're young, you don't think that's very nice. And suddenly the guy throws his arms around me and roars: 'I sit here all day long plodding away with a pencil - scratching and scratching - and you get it right away!' It was ...Mauve.”

“The cow exists for the light that comes to glide along and over the animal - the light doesn't exist for he cow.”

“At Heyser came the venerable old guys : Smit-Cranz, Coelman a. o. Those were the bigwigs, you see. We were the revolutionaries. And an opposition that we got! - In 't Kurhaus they hang a poster against us during our first exhibition; they named us 'mud painters'.”

“Dutch text Willem Maris, by H. de Boer, published by P. J. Zürcher, Den Haag, c. 1905-1910”

“As far as I can remember, it was before my twelfth year that I was sketching cows in the mornings before and afternoons after school, and because my brothers were 4 and 6 years older than me – naturally I got from them my first teachings in drawing and later in painting.”

“images of paintings and drawings by Willem Maris, in the RijksStudio of the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam”