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 work at my garden all the time and with love. What I need most are flowers, always. My heart is forever in Giverny.
My garden is a slow work, pursued with love and I do not deny that I am proud of it. Forty years ago, when I established myself here, there was nothing but a farmhouse and a poor orchard...I bought the house and little by little I enlarged and organized it...I dug, planted weeded, myself; in the evenings the children watered.
Gardening was something I learned in my youth when I was unhappy. I perhaps owe having become a painter to flowers.
Apart from painting and gardening, I'm not good at anything.
What could be said about me...a man to whom only his painting matters? And of course his garden and his flowers as well.
Pictures aren't made out of doctrines. Since the appearance of impressionism, the official salons, which used to be brown, have become blue, green, and red...But peppermint or chocolate, they are still confections.
What I need most of all is color, always, always.
My garden is my most beautiful masterpiece
I am good at only two things, and those are gardening and painting.
I must have flowers, always, and always.
The light constantly changes, and that alters the atmosphere and beauty of things every minute.
I would advise young artists . . . to paint as they can, as long as they can, without being afraid of painting badly . . . . If their painting doesn't improve by itself, it means that nothing can be done - and I wouldn't do anything!
I am following Nature without being able to grasp her...I perhaps owe having become a painter to flowers.
People discuss my art and pretend to understand as if it were necessary to understand, when it's simply necessary to love.