10 most beautiful quotes from Claude Monet (14 November 1840 – 5 December 1926), founder of French impressionist.
- “People discuss my art and pretend to understand as if it were necessary to understand, when it’s simply necessary to love.”
- “I would advise young artists . . . to paint as they can, as long as they can, without being afraid of painting badly . . . . If their painting doesn’t improve by itself, it means that nothing can be done – and I wouldn’t do anything!”
- “It took me time to understand my water lilies. I had planted them for the pleasure of it; I grew them without ever thinking of painting them.”
- “We’re having marvelous weather and I wish I could send you a little of the sunshine. I am slaving away on six paintings a day. I’m giving myself a hard time over it as I haven’t yet managed to capture the color of this landscape, there are moments when I’m appalled at the colors I’m having to use, I’m afraid what I’m doing is just dreadful and yet I really am understating it; the light is simply terrifying.”
- “No one is an artist unless he carries his picture in his head before painting it, and is sure of his method and composition.”
- “For me, a landscape does not exist in its own right, since its appearance changes at every moment; but the surrounding atmosphere brings it to life – the light and the air which vary continually. For me, it is only the surrounding atmosphere which gives subjects their true value.”
- “I am completely absorbed by my work. These landscapes of water and reflections have become an obsession. They are beyond the strength of an old man, and yet I am determined to set down what I feel. I have destroyed some…I have begun others over again…and I hope that something will come of so much effort.”
- “I know that to paint the sea really well, you need to look at it every hour of every day in the same place so that you can understand its way in that particular spot; and that is why I am working on the same motifs over and over again, four or six times even.”
- “I am following Nature without being able to grasp her… I perhaps owe having become a painter to flowers.”
- “It’s on the strength of observation and reflection that one finds a way. So we must dig and delve unceasingly.”
Tags: Claude Monet, Impressionism, Quotes, Water Lilies
The first Impressionist Exhibition held in Paris in April 1874, that probably marks the starting point for modern painting.
Camille Pissarro (1830 – 1903), Claude Monet (1840 – 1926), Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841 – 1919), and Edgar Degas (1834 – 1917), organized the exhibit of independent artsits.
In a critic’s sarcastic reaction to Monet’s painting Impression, Sunrise, 1873.
The term “Impressionism” was born as a commentary on the artist’s loose paint application and ambiguous subject matter.
The Impressionists introduced the public to contemporary subjects drawn from a direct engagement with the urban world of boulevards, cafe, theathers, cabarets, racetracks, and train stations.
The revolution of French Impressionism unfolded in Paris in a series of eight exhibitions held between 1874 and 1886.
The works exhibited during these years represented original investigations into the science of light and color, a commitment to outdoor painting. New source of inspiration for both the formal language and subject matter of painting, challenges to technical conventions of painting, and the idea of finish.
In turn, the Impressionists opened the door for a generation of artists who extended the boundaries of painting even further.
In this regards, some of the artists briefly associated with Impressionism such as Paul Gauguin (1848 – 1903), Vincent van Gogh (1853 – 1890), Georges Seurat and Cezanne, later emerged as powerful voices for an even more dramatic shift in thinking about the nature of goals of art.
Thereafter, the term “Post-Impressionism” was first coined in 1910 by the English critic Roger Fry.
Impressionism conjures up a series of unifying aesthetic concepts, whereas Post-Impressionism refers less to a single style, and more to a generational gap.
Tags: Claude Monet, History, Impressionism