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
Claude Monet quotes about
Despite my extremely modest prices, dealers and art lovers are turning their backs on me. It is very depressing to see the lack of interest shown in an art object which has no market value.
For almost two months now I've been struggling away with no result.
You'll understand, I'm sure that I'm chasing the merest sliver of color. It's my own fault. I want to grasp the intangible. It's terrible how the light runs out. Color, any color, lasts a second, sometimes 3 or 4 minutes at most...
One can do something if one can see and understand it...
I've always refused requests even from friends to employ a technique I know nothing about.
Without the fog, London would not be a beautiful city. It is fog that gives it its magnificent amplitude...its regular and massive blocks become grandiose in that mysterious mantle.
I insist upon 'doing it alone'... I have always worked better alone and from my own impressions.
I do have a dream, a tableau of the bathing place of La Grenouillère, for which I've done some bad pochades (sketches), but it is a dream. Renoir, who have just spent a couple of months here, also wants to paint this subject.
Think of me getting up before 6, I'm at work by 7 and I continue until 6.30 in the evening, standing up all the time, nine canvases. It's murderous...
My garden is a slow work, pursued with love and I do not deny that I am proud of it. Forty years ago, when I established myself here, there was nothing but a farmhouse and a poor orchard...I bought the house and little by little I enlarged and organized it...I dug, planted weeded, myself; in the evenings the children watered.
I let a good many mistakes show through when fixing my sensations. It will always be the same and this is what makes me despair.
The Thames was all gold. God it was beautiful, so fine that I began working a frenzy, following the sun and its reflections on the water.
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.