Every time I paint a portrait I lose a friend.

I do not judge, I only chronicle.

No small dabs of colour - you want plenty of paint to paint with.

Cultivate an ever-continuous power of observation. Wherever you are, be always ready to make slight notes of postures, groups and incidents.

Mine is the horny hand of toil.

Cultivate an ever continuous power of observation. Wherever you are, be always ready to make slight notes of postures, groups and incidents. Store up in the mind... a continuous stream of observations from which to make selections later. Above all things get abroad, see the sunlight and everything that is to be seen.

It is certain that at certain times talent entirely overcomes thought or poetry.

A portrait is a painting with something wrong with the mouth.

Color is an inborn gift, but appreciation of value is merely training of the eye, which everyone ought to be able to acquire.

The thicker you paint, the more it flows.

The habit of breaking up one's colour to make it brilliant dates from further back than Impressionism - Couture advocates it in a little book called 'Causeries d'Atelier' written about 1860 - it is part of the technique of Impressionism but used for quite a different reason.

A portrait is a picture in which there is just a tiny little something not quite right about the mouth.