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
It's on the strength of observation and reflection that one finds a way. So we must dig and delve unceasingly.
Pictures aren't made out of doctrines. Since the appearance of impressionism, the official salons, which used to be brown, have become blue, green, and red...But peppermint or chocolate, they are still confections.
I am good at only two things, and those are gardening and painting.
Everything changes, even stone.
Zaandam has enough to paint for a lifetime.
Nothing in the whole world is of interest to me but my painting and my flowers.
My aim is to give you only the things with which I am completely satisfied, even if it means asking you a little more [time] for them... for if I were to do otherwise I'd turn into a mere painting machine and you would be landed with a pile of incomplete work which would put off the most enthusiastic of art collectors...
I waited for the idea to consolidate, for the grouping and composition of themes to settle themselves in my brain.
I would like to paint the way a bird sings.
I perhaps owe having become a painter to flowers.
When it is dark, it seems to me as if I were dying, and I can't think any more.
Critic asks: 'And what, sir, is the subject matter of that painting?' - 'The subject matter, my dear good fellow, is the light.
Now I really feel the landscape, I can be bold and include every tone of blue and pink: it's enchanting, it's delicious.
It was at home I learned the little I know. Schools always appeared to me like a prison, and never could I make up my mind to stay there, not even for four hours a day, when the sunshine was inviting, the sea smooth, and when it was joy to run about the cliffs in the free air, or to paddle in the water.