Pierre-Auguste Renoir, 1875
"the driving force behind Impressionism"
A founder, instigator, and vivid example of Impressionist painting; Monet brought Boudin's dictum of preserving "one's first impression" to artistic near-perfection. It was only shortly after his birth that the discovery of metal-tubed pigments made painting outdoors practical. This new technology opened up an expansive world of light variation and Monet—like ancient explorers of uncharted new lands—launched exploratory journeys into these new visual countries. He frequently painted many times the same scene under differing light conditions.
Beginning his commercial artistic career at only 15 selling popular caricatures, this initial success disqualified Monet from the acclaimed art schools and sent him on a road of his own including years on the move avoiding creditors and seeking a home and place to paint. Unlike the majority of pioneering artists, however, he was recognized during his lifetime and died both prosperous and famous. During the last half of his life, he traveled less and less while cultivating the gardens of Giverny which—like his paintings—included bright patches of color in a messy but balanced whole.
“What keeps my heart awake is colorful silence.”
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“I'm not performing miracles, I'm just using up and wasting a lot of paint...”
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“Everyone discusses my art and pretends to understand, as if it were necessary to understand, when it is simply necessary to love.”
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“The essence of this motif is the mirror of water, whose appearance alters at every moment.”
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“what I want to reproduce is what lies between the motif and me.. I want to paint the air in which the bridge, the house and the boat are to be found - the beauty of the air around them... it is only the, surrounding atmosphere which gives subjects their true value.”
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“'Water Lilies' is an extension of my life. Without the water, the lilies cannot live, as I am without art.”
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“I was completely ignorant of the poetry of Poe; it is admirable, it is poetry itself, the dream, and how one feels that you have translated its soul! I knew only Poe's prose, which I had read and admired very young before I had heard it spoken of, but how the poems complete and express the man he was.”
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“When you get to my age, there is nothing more to look forward to. Each day brings its tribulations and each day difficulties arise.. .So I'm giving up the struggle once and for all, abandoning all hope of success.”
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“I was born undisciplined. Never, even as a child, could I be made to obey a set rule. School was always like a prison to me, I could never bring myself to stay there, even four hours a day, when the sun was shining and the sea was so tempting, and it was such fun scrambling over cliffs and paddling in the shallows. Such, to the great despair of my parents, was the unruly but healthy life I lived until I was fourteen or fifteen. In the meantime I somehow picked up the rudiments of reading, writing and arithmetic, with a smattering of spelling. And there my schooling ended. It never worried me very much because I always had plenty of amusements on the side. I doodled in the margins of my books, I decorated our blue copy paper with ultra-fantastic drawings, and I drew the faces and profiles of my schoolmasters as outrageously as I could, distorting them out of all recognition.”
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“It's on the strength of observation and reflection that one finds a way. So we must dig and delve unceasingly.”
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“I have always worked better alone and from my own impressions... If he Renoir knew I was about to go, Renoir would doubtless want to join me and that would be equally disastrous for both of us.”
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“Every day I discover even more beautiful things. It is intoxicating me, and I want to paint it all - my head is bursting.. ..I want to fight, scratch it off, start again, because I start to see and understand. I seems to me as if I can see nature and I can catch it all...”
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“I must have flowers, always, and always... I perhaps owe having become a painter to flowers.”
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“Just as the spectrum exteriorizes for us the composition of light, so the color of a Monet makes it possible for us to know the qualitative essence of another person's sensations.”
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“I was born undisciplined. Never, even as a child, could I be made to obey a set rule. School was always like a prison to me, I could never bring myself to stay there, even four hours a day, when the sun was shining and the sea was so tempting, and it was such fun scrambling over cliffs and paddling in the shallows. Such, to the great despair of my parents, was the unruly but healthy life I lived until I was fourteen or fifteen. In the meantime I somehow picked up the rudiments of reading, writing and arithmetic, with a smattering of spelling. And there my schooling ended. It never worried me very much because I always had plenty of amusements on the side. I doodled in the margins of my books, I decorated our blue copy paper with ultra-fantastic drawings, and I drew the faces and profiles of my schoolmasters as outrageously as I could, distorting them out of all recognition.”
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“It was the Impressionists who made an art of instantaneous, and Claude Monet who showed how it could be done.”
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