My picks...

Skull of a skeleton with burning cigarette

A few thoughts collected:

He battled within himself...

‘ When one sees these works for the first time, one is bitterly, bitterly disappointed and finds then slapdash ugly, badly painted, badly drawn, wrong in colour, utterly inadequate’.

'Style and subject matter'

‘I kept looking to see if it was Japanese yet! Childish wouldn’t you say?’

The Courtesan (After Eisen)

He 'possessed the fertile imagination of a true genius'

'He tried not to see bleak things bleaky'

Almond blossom

'It often seems to me that the night is much alive and richly coloured than the day'

Jean-Francois Millet

Starry Night

Seurat – Woman signing in a café chantant

'I have a horrible need for – I will use the word religion, so I go outside at night to paint the stars'

The starry night over the Rhone

'He was an enthusiastic reader and his knowledge of literature fuelled his creativity as an artist'

'The sight of the stars makes me dream...In as simple a way as the black spots on the map representing towns and villages, makes me dream...Why I say to myself should the spots of lights in the firmament be less accessible to us than the black spots and the map of France? Just as we take the train to go to Tarascon or Roven, we take death to reach a star'