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
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...
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.
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.
I insist upon 'doing it alone'... I have always worked better alone and from my own impressions.
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.
The effect of sincerity is to give one's work the character of a protest. The painter, being concerned only with conveying his impression, simply seeks to be himself and no one else.
I don’t think I’m made for any earthly kind of pleasure.
The only merit I have is to have painted directly from nature with the aim of conveying my impressions in front of the most fugitive effects.
It's the hardest thing to be alone in being satisfied with what one's done.
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...
I intend to do a large painting of the cliff at Etretat, although it is terribly bold of me to do so after Courbet has painted it so admirably, but I will try to do it in a different way...
I know that to paint the sea really well, you need to look at it every hour of every day in the same place so that you can understand its way in that particular spot; and that is why I am working on the same motifs over and over again, four or six times even.
Ninety per cent of the theory of Impressionist painting is in . . . Ruskin's Elements.
I'm in a foul mood as I'm making stupid mistakes... This morning I lost beyond repair a painting with which I had been happy, having done about twenty sessions on it; it had to be thoroughly scraped away... what a rage I was in!