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
My rejection at the Salon brought an end to my hesitation [to settle in Paris] since after this failure I can no longer claim to cope... alas, that fatal rejection has virtually taken the bread out of my mouth.
It goes without saying that I will do anything at any price to pull myself out of a situation like this [rejection] so that I can start work immediately on my next Salon picture and ensure that such a thing should not happen again.
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.
I've always refused requests even from friends to employ a technique I know nothing about.
If the world really looks like that I will paint no more!
I'm going to get down to a still life on a size 50 canvas of rayfish and dogfish with old fishermen's baskets. Then I'm going to turn out a few pictures to send wherever possible, given that now, first and foremost - unfortunately - I have to earn some money.
One can do something if one can see and understand it...
You'll understand, I'm sure that I'm chasing the merest sliver of color. It's my own fault. I want to grasp the intangible. It's terrible how the light runs out. Color, any color, lasts a second, sometimes 3 or 4 minutes at most...
Techniques vary, art stays the same; it is a transposition of nature at once forceful and sensitive.
To have gone to all this trouble to get to this is just too stupid! Outside there's brilliant sunshine but I don't feel up to looking at it...
Now, more than ever, I realize just how illusory my undeserved success has been. I still hold out some hope of doing better, but age and unhappiness have sapped my strength.
I work at my garden all the time and with love. What I need most are flowers, always. My heart is forever in Giverny.