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.
Zaandam has enough to paint for a lifetime.
When it is dark, it seems to me as if I were dying, and I can't think any more.
I'm in fine fettle and fired with a desire to paint.
Colors pursue me like a constant worry. They even worry me in my sleep.
I'm not performing miracles, I'm using up and wasting a lot of paint...
I waited for the idea to consolidate, for the grouping and composition of themes to settle themselves in my brain.
I perhaps owe having become a painter to flowers.
Now I really feel the landscape, I can be bold and include every tone of blue and pink: it's enchanting, it's delicious.
I haven't many years left ahead of me and I must devote all my time to painting, in the hope of achieving something worthwhile in the end, something if possible that will satisfy me.
Critic asks: 'And what, sir, is the subject matter of that painting?' - 'The subject matter, my dear good fellow, is the light.
My only desire is an intimate infusion with nature, and the only fate I wish is to have worked and lived in harmony with her laws.
My garden is my most beautiful masterpiece
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...