Eugène Fromentin

"The things I haven't seen with my own eyes are for me unknown."

"What we've lost - 'I said in more or less these terms' - is the proper interest in and taste for detail. We've been noting that for a long time yet the loss is irremediable. In the old days man was ev…"

"The art of painting is only the art of expressing the invisible by the visible. Whether its roads be great or small, they are sown with problems which it is permitted to sound for one's self as truth,…"

"Interpreting the Orient through the arts would destroy it, the artistic exploitation might eventually prove as harmful as military or political adventurism."

"..the great Dutch school seemed to think of nothing but painting well the total absence of what today we call 'a subject'."

"..an entirely original painter , high-minded and genuinely rustic in nature, who has expressed things about the country and its inhabitants, about their toil, their melancholy, and the nobleness of th…"

"..that zone of consciousness through which all artists travel mentally, before ever approaching the easel."

"What motive had a Dutch painter in painting a picture? None. And notice that he never asked for one. A peasant with a drunken red nose looks at you with his heavy eye and laughs with open mouth showin…"