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
Manet wanted one day to paint my wife and children. Renoir was there. He took a canvas and began painting them, too. After a while, Manet took me aside and whispered, 'You're on very good terms with Renoir and take an interest in his future - do advise him to give up painting! You can see for yourself that it's not his metier at all.
I've been working so hard that I'm exhausted... I feel I won't be able to do without a few weeks' rest, so I'm going off to see the sea.
I get madder and madder on giving back what I feel.
It would be asking too much to want to sell only to connoisseurs - that way starvation lies.
These landscapes of water and reflections have become an obsession. It's quite beyond my powers at my age, and yet I want to succeed in expressing what I feel.
Never, even as a child, would I bend to a rule.
My life has been nothing but a failure.
I despise the opinion of the press and the so-called critics.
Thanks to my work everything's going well; it's a great consolation.
I'm quite content: although what I'm doing is far from being as I should like, I am complemented often enough all the same...
No one but myself knows the anxiety I go through and the trouble I give myself to finish paintings which do not satisfy me and seem to please so very few others.
I say that whoever claims to have finished a canvas is terribly arrogant.
It's enough to drive you crazy, trying to depict the weather, the atmosphere, the ambience.
Take clear water with grass waving at the bottom. It's wonderful to look at, but to try to paint it is enough to make one insane.