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
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.
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.
I'm never finished with my paintings; the further I get, the more I seek the impossible and the more powerless I feel.
My garden is my most beautiful masterpiece
All of a sudden I had the revelation of how enchanting my pond was.
I sometimes feel ashamed that I am devoting myself to artistic pursuits while so many of our people are suffering and dying for us. It's true that fretting never did any good.
My heart is forever in Giverny.
I am following Nature without being able to grasp her, I perhaps owe having become a painter to flowers.
No one is an artist unless he carries his picture in his head before painting it, and is sure of his method and composition.