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
I'm never finished with my paintings; the further I get, the more I seek the impossible and the more powerless I feel.
I am good at only two things, and those are gardening and painting.
I had so much fire in me and so many plans...
My heart is forever in Giverny.
Everything changes, even stone.
I would like to paint the way a bird sings.
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 didn't become an impressionist. As long as I can remember I always have been one.
It is better to have done something than to have been someone.
It is a tragedy that we live in a world where physical courage is so common, and moral courage is so rare.
All I did was to look at what the universe showed me, to let my brush bear witness to it.
It's on the strength of observation and reflection that one finds a way. So we must dig and delve unceasingly.
When you go out to paint, try to forget what objects you have before you - a tree, house, a field....Merely think, here is a little square of blue, here an oblong of pink, here a streak of yellow, and paint it just as it looks to you, the exact color and shape, until it gives your own naive impression of the scene before you.
I want the unobtainable. Other artists paint a bridge, a house, a boat, and that's the end. They are finished. I want to paint the air which surrounds the bridge, the house, the boat, the beauty of the air in which these objects are located, and that is nothing short of impossible.