In a sense, the "mirror of nature" quality of salon art in the second half of the nineteenth century was aimed at the new art-buying class, the class whose attitudes have turned art into a "product." Both form and content in that salon art were intended to flatter this customer with their comprehensibility. The influence of that compromise on the subsequent history of art is probably self-evident.

I work on my art - upon one thing or another - every day of my life. When, for whatever reason, I am unable work on it outwardly, I am working on it inwardly. I both daydream and night-dream of new works.

An artist must always be changing - in the sense that the conceptions that issue from his understanding of his culture, the forms through which that culture is reworked, develop and change from series to series. Winkelman, the German art historian who founded the scientific study of art, said that the paradoxical essence of true art is to press forward while looking back.