Maurizio Cecchetti, «Studi Cattolici»
I remember a joke by Degas about Impressionism: C'est plein de courants d'air. He meant that, rather than painting en plein air, he preferred the closed room of his own studio, the dim light that filtered through the wide windows of the atelier, whose panes were almost never washed. That was a guarantee of truth, the truth of his own memory, that distillation which remains when you’ve forgotten all you know about reality. And to understand this 'seclusion' I refer again to Degas, when, while travelling through Burgundy along with his friend Bartholomé, he sketched those landscapes, ‘unique’ pieces in a career as wide and teeming with paintings, drawings and sculptures of various subjects, and afterwards he tod people he had had the window of the moving train as a ‘frame’.