"The first thing I ever saw painted and that I remember and remembered seeing and feeling as painted, no one of you could know what that was, it was a very large oil painting. It was the panorama of the battle of Waterloo. I must have been about eight years old and it was very exciting, it was exciting seeing the panorama of the battle of Waterloo. There was a man there who told all about the battle, I knew a good deal about it already because I always read historical novels and history and I know about the sunken road where the French cavalry were caught but though all that was exciting the thing that was exciting me was the oil painting. It was an oil painting a continuous oil painting, one was surrounded by an oil painting and I who lived continuously out of doors and felt air and sunshine and things to see felt that this was all different and very exciting. There it all was the things to see but there was no air it just was an oil painting. I remember standing on the little platform in the center and almost consciously knowing that there was no air. There was no air, there was no feeling of air, it just was an oil painting and it had a life of its own and it was a scene as an oil painting sees it and it was a real thing that looked like something I had seen but it had nothing to do with that something that I knew because the feeling was not at all that not at all the feeling which I had when I saw anything that was really what the oil painting showed. It, the oil painting, showed it as an oil painting. That is what an oil painting is... "I do remember... a sign painting of a man painting a sign a large sign painting and this did hold my attention. I used to go and look at it and stand and watch it and then it bothered me because it almost did look like a man painting a sign and one wants, one likes to be deceived but not for too long. That is a thing to remember about an oil painting. It bothered me many years later when I first looked at the Velasquez in Madrid. They almost looked really like people and if they kept on doing so might it not bother one as waxworks bother one. And if it did bother one was it an oil painting, because an oil painting is something that looking at it looks as it is, an oil painting...One does not like to be mixed in one's own mind as to which looks most like something at which one is looking the thing or the painting... "...I began to look at all and any oil painting. I looked at funny pictures in churches where they described in a picture what had happened to them, the ex-voto pictures. I remember one of a woman falling out of a high two wheeled cart, this a picture of what happened to her and how she was not killed. I looked at all oil painting that I happened to see and not consciously but slowly I began to fool that it made no difference what an oil painting painted it always did and should look like an oil painting..." Excerpts from Gertrude Stein's lecture at Museum of Modern Art