Claude Monet
Claude Monet
Oscar-Claude Monetwas a founder of French Impressionist painting, and the most consistent and prolific practitioner of the movement's philosophy of expressing one's perceptions before nature, especially as applied to plein-air landscape painting. The term "Impressionism" is derived from the title of his painting Impression, soleil levant, which was exhibited in 1874 in the first of the independent exhibitions mounted by Monet and his associates as an alternative to the Salon de Paris...
NationalityFrench
ProfessionPainter
Date of Birth14 November 1840
CityParis, France
CountryFrance
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 intend to do a large painting of the cliff at Etretat, although it is terribly bold of me to do so after Courbet has painted it so admirably, but I will try to do it in a different way...
The only merit I have is to have painted directly from nature with the aim of conveying my impressions in front of the most fugitive effects.
No, I'm not a great painter. Neither am I a great poet.
I think only of my painting, and if I were to drop it, I think I'd go crazy.
These landscapes of water and reflections have become an obsession. It's quite beyond my powers at my age, and yet I want to succeed in expressing what I feel.
What I need most of all is color, always, always.
I do what I can to convey what I experience before nature and most often, in order to succeed in conveying what I feel, I totally forget the most elementary rules of painting, if they exist that is.
Never, even as a child, would I bend to a rule.
Getting up at 4 in the morning, I slave away all day until by the evening I'm exhausted, and I end by forgetting all my responsibilities, thinking only of the work I've set out to do.
I've been working so hard that I'm exhausted... I feel I won't be able to do without a few weeks' rest, so I'm going off to see the sea.
My rejection at the Salon brought an end to my hesitation [to settle in Paris] since after this failure I can no longer claim to cope... alas, that fatal rejection has virtually taken the bread out of my mouth.
What is it that's taken hold of me, for me to carry on like this in relentless pursuit of something beyond my powers?
Lots of people will protest that it's quite unreal and that I'm out of my mind, but that's just too bad