"Should we believe the photograph represents the "objective truth" while the painting records the artist´s subjective vision - the way he transformed "what he saw"?  Can we here compare "the image on the retina" with "the image in the mind"?  Such speculations easily lead into a morass of un-provables.  Take the image on the artist´s retina.  It sounds scientific enough, but actually there never was one such image which we could single out for comparison with either photograph or painting.  What there was  was an endless succession of innumerable images as the painter scanned the landscape in front of him, and these images sent a complex pattern of impulses through the optic nerves to his brain.  Even the artist knew nothing of these events, and we know even less.  How far the picture that formed in his mind corresponded to or deviated from the photograph it is even less profitable to ask.  What we do know is that these went out into nature to look for material for a picture and their artistic wisdom lead them to organize the elements of the landscap into works of art of marvellous complexity that bears as much relationship to a surveyor´s record as a poem bears to a police report."

(Phaidon Press Ltd - 1995)