At the Museum

"All inspired painters are impressionists, even though it be true that some impressionists are not inspired". (Joaquin Sorolla)

"My only ambition was to create an honest picture that would interpret nature as she really is, as she ought to be seen". (Joaquin Sorolla)

"With all its excesses, the modern impressionistic movement has given us one discovery, the color violet. It is the only discovery of importance in the art world since Velazquez". (Joaquin Sorolla)

"The great difficulty with large canvases is that they should by right be painted as fast as a sketch. By speed only can you gain an appearance of fleeting effect. But to paint a three yard canvas with the same dispatch as one of ten inches is well-nigh impossible". (Joaquin Sorolla)

"I hate darkness. Claude Monet once said that painting in general did not have light enough in it. I agree with him. We painters, however, can never reproduce sunlight as it really is. I can only approach the truth of it". (Joaquin Sorolla)

Joaquin Sorolla y Bastida [Spanish Realist/Impressionist painter, 1863-1923] - Siesta in the Garden, 1904

Horation Walker [Canadian painter, 1858-1938] - Sheepyard, Moonlight

"If ever a painter wrought a miracle of illusion with brush and pigment that painter was Velazquez in his Las Meninas, at the Prado in Madrid". (Joaquin Sorolla)

"Nature, the sun itself, produces color effects... instantaneously. The impression of these evanescent visions is what we make desperate attempts to catch and fix by any means at hand. At such moments I am unconscious of materials, of style, of rules, of everything that intervenes between my perception and the object or idea perceived". (Joaquin Sorolla)

"The older I become, the more I realize that drawing is the most important of all the problems of picture-making". (Joaquin Sorolla)

"As far as outdoor work is concerned, a studio is only a garage; a place in which to store pictures and repair them, never a place in which to paint them". (Joaquin Sorolla)

Hugues Merle [French painter, 1823-1881]

"When an artist begins to count strokes instead of regarding nature he is lost. This preoccupation with technique, at the expense of truth and sincerity, is the principal fault I find in much of the work of modern painters". (Joaquin Sorolla)

"How long did it take me to delimit this art? Twenty years! ... It was a laborious process, but a methodical and rational one; gradually the hesitations were ironed out, but not all of a sudden". (Joaquin Sorolla)

"Nothing is truer than truth. All the mistakes committed by great artists are due to their having separated themselves from truth, believing that their imagination is stronger... Nothing is stronger than nature. With nature in front of us we can do everything well". (Joaquin Sorolla)

Italian School, Mercury and Apollo, c. 1800

Ivan Fedorovich Choultse [Russian painter, 1874-1937] - Mer au Clair de Lune

Jan Davidsz. de Heem [Dutch Baroque Era painter, 1606-ca.1683]

Jean Béraud [Russian-born French Impressionist painter, 1849-ca.1935] - A Parisian Bal

Jean Béraud [Russian-born French Impressionist painter, 1849-ca.1935]

Jean Béraud [Russian-born French Impressionist Painter, 1849-ca.1935] - The opening day of the Salon

Jean Béraud [Russian-born French Impressionist Painter, 1849-ca.1935] - La Place du Louvre

Jean Louis Hamon [French painter, 1821-1874]

Jean-François Millet [French Realist painter, 1814-1875] - Autumn Landscape with a Flock of Turkeys (1872-73)

Jean-Honoré Fragonard [French Rococo Era painter, 1732-1806] - La fontaine d'amour, 1785

Herman Jean Joseph Richir [Belgian painter, 1866-1942]

Johan Christian Dahl [Norwegian Romantic painter, 1788-1857] - Birch Tree in a Storm, 1849

Johann Peter Hasenclever [German painter, 1810-1853] - Sentimental Woman, 1846