“Yes, Johannes Vermeer [Dutch 17th century master painter] paints in thin layers – there is no waste effort – and those small dots – no, they are not like Seurat's, though they contain all the light the pointillist may have wished for, concentrated, hovering before the object, but not obliterating it... Vermeer is not a sun painter, but rather a moon-painter – like Uccello – that's good, it is the pure, final stage of art, the moment when it becomes more real than reality.”

— Arshile Gorky

Source: 1942 - 1948, Arshile Gorky, – Goats on the roof' (2009), pp. 357-58: in: 'A visit to the Metropolitan Museum with Gorky', Ethel Schwabacher]], 1947

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Arshile Gorky 32

Armenian-American painter 1904–1948

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“In the degree that the images of concrete irrationality approach phenomenal reality, the corresponding means of expression approach those of the great realist painters - Velasquez and Vermeer of Delft - to paint realistically according to irrational thought, according to the unknown imagination.”

Salvador Dalí (1904–1989) Spanish artist

Source: Quotes of Salvador Dali, 1931 - 1940, My Pictorial Struggle', S. Dali, 1935, Chapter: 'My Pictorial Struggle', pp. 12-13

“In our beginnings, Fantin, Whistler and I were all on the same road, the road from Holland [Dutch 17th century painters]”

Edgar Degas (1834–1917) French artist

Quote of Degas, later recalled by Paul Poujaud (written in his letter to Marcel Guérin, 11 July 1936); as quoted by Colin B. Bailey, in The Annenberg Collection: Masterpieces of Impressionism and Post-impressionism, publish. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2009, p. 54
Degas is recalling his early works of the 1860's
quotes, undated

“Kandinsky, Wassily – painter, printmaker and author – the first painter to base painting on purely pictorial means of expression and abandon objects in his pictures.”

Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944) Russian painter

Quote of Wassily Kandinsky, 1919 - his self-characterisation in 'Das Kunstblatt', 1919; as cited in 'Klee & Kandinsky', 2015 exhibition text, Lenbachhaus und Kunstbau Munich, 2015-2016 https://www.zpk.org/en/exhibitions/review_0/2015/klee-kandinsky-969.html
1916 -1920

“Just follow the lead of the Dutch seventeenth-century master-painters, we have to look at the country around us in the way the old masters did.”

Anton Mauve (1838–1888) Dutch painter (1838–1888)

translation from original Dutch, Fons Heijnsbroek, 2018
(version in original Dutch / origineel citaat van Anton Mauve, in het Nederlands:) Neem toch een voorbeeld aan de Hollandse zeventiende-eeuwse meesters, we moeten kijken naar het land om ons heen zoals de oude meesters dat deden.
as cited in Anton Mauve en de Haagse School, S.F.M. de Bodt, in 'Openbaar Kunstbezit', Den Haag, 1997b, p. 30
undated quotes

“Nearly conscious in someone like Michelangelo, or Paolo Uccello, quite intuitive in painters such as Ingres, or Corot, it works on the basis of numbers which belong to the painting itself, not to whatever it represents.”

Jean Metzinger (1883–1956) French painter

Cubism was born

“Just follow the lead of the Dutch seventeenth-century master-painters, we have to look at the country around us in the way the old masters did. (translation from original Dutch, Fons Heijnsbroek, 2018)”

Anton Mauve (1838–1888) Dutch painter (1838–1888)

(version in original Dutch / origineel citaat van Anton Mauve, in het Nederlands:) Neem toch een voorbeeld aan de Hollandse zeventiende-eeuwse meesters, we moeten kijken naar het land om ons heen zoals de oude meesters dat deden.
as cited in Anton Mauve en de Haagse School, S.F.M. de Bodt, in 'Openbaar Kunstbezit', Den Haag, 1997b, p. 30
undated quotes

“A modern painter may have many audiences or one or none; he paints in relation to none of them, though he longs for the audience of other modern painters.”

Robert Motherwell (1915–1991) American artist

Source: 1950s, The painter and the audience' (1954), p. 107

“Do you know what I really need to make a well-finished painting? 2 years at Gérome or somebody like him, working in the studio.... because that is the only way to become a good painter. That whole business.. then a small watercolour than a little painting and finally when I have earned so much that I could study, I have become too old and too miserable.”

George Hendrik Breitner (1857–1923) Dutch painter and photographer

translation from the original Dutch, Fons Heijnsbroek
version in original Dutch (citaat van Breitner's brief, in het Nederlands:) Weet U wat ik nodig heb om een goed afgewerkt schilderij te maken? 2 jaar bij Gérome of zoo iemand op 't atelier te werken.. ..want dat is de enige manier om een goed schilder te worden. Dat gewurm, dan een aquarelletje dan een schilderijtje en eindelijk als ik daardoor zo veel verdiend heb dat ik zou kunnen studeeren ben ik te oud en te beroerd geworden.
In his letter to A.P. van Stolk, nr. 51, c. 1884; RKD-Archive, The Hague; as cited in master-thesis Van Gogh en Breitner in Den Haag, Helewise Berger, University of Utrecht, The Netherlands, p. 29
Breitner responds to accusations from his Maecenas that he refused to learn from well-known Dutch painters how to finish his paintings well. In 1884 already Breitner started in the studio of Cormon in Paris
before 1890

“If deceiving the eye were the only business of the art, there is no doubt, indeed, but the minute painter would be more apt to succeed; but it is not the eye, it is the mind, which the painter of genius desires to address; nor will he waste a moment upon those smaller objects, which only serve to catch the sense, to divide the attention, and to counteract his great design of speaking to the heart.”

Joshua Reynolds (1723–1792) English painter, specialising in portraits

Discourse no. 3; vol. 1, pp. 70-71.
Discourses on Art

“I think continually of some way of painting without the dot. I hope to achieve this but I have not been able to solve the problem of dividing the pure tone without harshness... How can one combine the purity and simplicity of the dot with the fullness, suppleness, liberty, spontaneity and freshness of sensation postulated by our impressionist art? This is the question which preoccupies me, for the dot is meager, lacking in body, diaphanous, more monotonous than simple, even in the Seurat's, particularly in the Seurat's [paintings]... I'm constantly pondering this question, I shall go to the Louvre to look at certain painters who are interesting from this point of view. Isn't it senseless that there are no Turners [here]..”

Camille Pissarro (1830–1903) French painter

Quote of Pissarro, Paris, 6 September 1888, in a letter to his son Lucien; from Camille Pissarro - Letters to His Son Lucien ed. John Rewald, with assistance of Lucien Pissarro; from the unpublished French letters; transl. Lionel Abel; Pantheon Books Inc. New York, second edition, 1943, pp. 131-132
1880's

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