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 the hardest thing to be alone in being satisfied with what one's done.
It is only too easy to catch people's attention by doing something worse than anyone else has dared to do it before.
If the world really looks like that I will paint no more!
Ninety per cent of the theory of Impressionist painting is in . . . Ruskin's Elements.
I work at my garden all the time and with love. What I need most are flowers, always. My heart is forever in Giverny.
To have gone to all this trouble to get to this is just too stupid! Outside there's brilliant sunshine but I don't feel up to looking at it...
Despite my exhaustion I have a devil of a time getting to sleep because of the rats above my bed and a pig who lives beneath my room...
Now, more than ever, I realize just how illusory my undeserved success has been. I still hold out some hope of doing better, but age and unhappiness have sapped my strength.
I will bring lots of studies back with me so I can work on some big things at home.
I've only myself to blame for it, my impotence most of all and my weakness. If I do any good work now it will be only by chance.
I'm very happy, very delighted. I'm setting to like a fighting cockerel, for I'm surrounded here by all that I love.
It really is appallingly difficult to do something which is complete in every respect, and I think most people are content with mere approximations. Well, my dear friend, I intend to battle on, scrape off and start again...
I have once more taken up things that can't be done: water with grasses weaving on the bottom. But I'm always tackling that sort of thing!
It seems to me that when I see nature I see it ready-made, completely written - but then, try to do it!