George Hendrik Breitner Quotes

3 Sourced Quotes

What wonderful weather it has been today, I had not been outside for so long and so I spent the entire day out of doors. Wonderful. Nature is always fresh and new and to stay fresh she is the only thing giving all that is necessary. Everything is rich. I mean, not only the outdoors, landscape or something like that, but simply everything, yes everything except your workplace, and not even excluding that. The spectacle is in the spectator.

George Hendrik Breitner
Myself, I will paint the people in the street and in the houses, the streets and houses they have built, life in general. I will attempt to be 'Le peintre du peuple' (the painter of the people), or rather I am that already, because I want to be. I want to paint history, and I will, but history in its' broadest sense. A market, a wharf, a river, a group of soldiers under a burning sun or in the snow.

George Hendrik Breitner
After viewing a few paintings and a drawing that I had brought in the day before yesterday, Mr.v.d.Kellen [Dutch art dealer] assured me that there was absolutely no chance of placing anything of mine here, unless it was bought under pressure of a pleasant future, and I think he is right because he showed me various paintings, and specifically those that were closest to my understanding of art were the most difficult to place......I was astounded and furious about such far-reaching stupidity and the pedantery of the man [another art dealer, Herman Deichmann]. All the paintings present were beneath criticism, they were just the usual German Academic stuff.

George Hendrik Breitner