140 Quotes by Claude Monet

Everyone discusses my art and pretends to understand, as if it were necessary to understand, when it is simply necessary to love.

It's on the strength of observation and reflection that one finds a way. So we must dig and delve unceasingly.

When you go out to paint, try to forget what objects you have before you - a tree, house, a field....Merely think, here is a little square of blue, here an oblong of pink, here a streak of yellow, and paint it just as it looks to you, the exact color and shape, until it gives your own naive impression of the scene before you.

Paint what you really see, not what you think you ought to see; not the object isolated as in a test tube, but the object enveloped in sunlight and atmosphere, with the blue dome of Heaven reflected in the shadows.

All I did was to look at what the universe showed me, to let my brush bear witness to it.

The light constantly changes, and that alters the atmosphere and beauty of things every minute.

Light is the most important person in the picture.

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For me, a landscape does not exist in its own right, since its appearance changes at every moment; but the surrounding atmosphere brings it to life - the light and the air which vary continually. For me, it is only the surrounding atmosphere which gives subjects their true value.

It is a tragedy that we live in a world where physical courage is so common, and moral courage is so rare.

I would like to paint the way a bird sings.

It is better to have done something than to have been someone.

Everything changes, even stone.

My only desire is an intimate infusion with nature, and the only fate I wish is to have worked and lived in harmony with her laws.

Critic asks: 'And what, sir, is the subject matter of that painting?' - 'The subject matter, my dear good fellow, is the light.

It took me time to understand my water lilies. I had planted them for the pleasure of it; I grew them without ever thinking of painting them.

I am good at only two things, and those are gardening and painting.

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All of a sudden I had the revelation of how enchanting my pond was.

What I need most of all is color, always, always.

It was at home I learned the little I know. Schools always appeared to me like a prison, and never could I make up my mind to stay there, not even for four hours a day, when the sunshine was inviting, the sea smooth, and when it was joy to run about the cliffs in the free air, or to paddle in the water.

By the single example of this painter devoted to his art with such independence, my destiny as a painter opened out to me.

I'm enjoying the most perfect tranquility, free from all worries, and in consequence would like to stay this way forever, in a peaceful corner of the countryside like this.

No one is an artist unless he carries his picture in his head before painting it, and is sure of his method and composition.

My garden is my most beautiful masterpiece

It's enough to drive you crazy, trying to depict the weather, the atmosphere, the ambience.

My heart is forever in Giverny.

I'm not performing miracles, I'm using up and wasting a lot of paint.

Listening only to my instincts, I discovered superb things.

I'm continuing to work hard, not without periods of discouragement, but my strength comes back again.

The real subject of every painting is light.

Now I really feel the landscape, I can be bold and include every tone of pink and blue: it's enchanting, it's delicious, and I hope it will please you.

I see less and less... I need to avoid lateral light, which darkens my colors. Nevertheless, I always paint at the times of day most propitious for me, as long as my paint tubes and brushes are not mixed up... I will paint almost blind, as Beethoven composed completely deaf.

A good impression is lost so quickly.

My work is always better when I am alone and follow my own impressions.

I haven't many years left ahead of me and I must devote all my time to painting, in the hope of achieving something worthwhile in the end, something if possible that will satisfy me.

Nature won't be summoned to order and won't be kept waiting. It must be caught, well caught.

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.

Color is my day-long obsession, joy and torment.

I'm never finished with my paintings; the further I get, the more I seek the impossible and the more powerless I feel.

Color is my day-long obsession, joy and torment. To such an extent indeed that one day, finding myself at the deathbed of a woman who had been and still was very dear to me, I caught myself in the act of focusing on her temples and automatically analyzing the succession of appropriately graded colors which death was imposing on her motionless face.

When it is dark, it seems to me as if I were dying, and I can't think any more.

Impressionism is only direct sensation. All great painters were less or more impressionists. It is mainly a question of instinct, and much simpler than [John Singer] Sargent thinks.

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.

One can do something if one can see and understand it.

Lots of people will protest that it's quite unreal and that I'm out of my mind, but that's just too bad

Colors pursue me like a constant worry. They even worry me in my sleep.

Zaandam has enough to paint for a lifetime.

I'm knocked out, I've never felt so physically and mentally exhausted, I'm quite stupid with it and long only for bed; but I am happy.

These landscapes of water and reflection have become an obsession.

Nothing in the whole world is of interest to me but my painting and my flowers.

I'm in fine fettle and fired with a desire to paint.

For me, the subject is of secondary importance: I want to convey what is alive between me and the subject.

One day Boudin said to me, 'Learn to draw well and appreciate the sea, the light, the blue sky.' I took his advice.

One's better off alone, and yet there are so many things that are impossible to fathom on one's own. In fact it's a terrible business and the task is a hard one.

Perhaps it's true that I'm very hard on myself, but that's better than exhibiting mediocre work... too few were satisfactory enough to trouble the public with.

I sometimes feel ashamed that I am devoting myself to artistic pursuits while so many of our people are suffering and dying for us. It's true that fretting never did any good.

I've done what I could as a painter and that seems to me to be sufficient. I don't want to be compared to the great masters of the past, and my painting is open to criticism; that's enough.

the more I live, the more I regret how little i know

The point is to know how to use the colours, the choice of which is, when all's said and done, a matter of habit.

If only the weather would improve, there'd be hope of some work, but every day brings rain.

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.

My eyes were finally opened and I understood nature. I learned at the same time to love it.

Apart from painting and gardening, I'm not good at anything.

For me, a landscape does not exist in its own right, since its appearance changes at any moment.

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.

I'm working hard with more determination than ever. My success at the Salon led to my selling several paintings and since your absence I have made 800 francs; I hope, when I have contracts with more dealers, it will be better still.

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.

The older I become the more I realize of that I have to work very hard to reproduce what I search: the instantaneous. The influence of the atmosphere on the things and the light scattered throughout.

Techniques vary, art stays the same; it is a transposition of nature at once forceful and sensitive.

My life has been nothing but a failure.

I work at my garden all the time and with love. What I need most are flowers, always. My heart is forever in Giverny.

While adding the finishing touches to a painting might appear insignificant, it is much harder to do than one might suppose.

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, and that is nothing less than the impossible.

I'm getting so slow at my work it makes me despair, but... I'm increasingly obsessed by the need to render what I experience, and I'm praying that I'll have a few more good years left to me.

It's the hardest thing to be alone in being satisfied with what one's done.

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.

It really is appallingly difficult to do something which is complete in every respect, and I think most people are content with mere approximations. Well, my dear friend, I intend to battle on, scrape off and start again.

I say that whoever claims to have finished a canvas is terribly arrogant.

I never draw except with brush and paint.

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.

It would be a very bad idea... to exhibit even a small number of this new series, as the whole effect can only be achieved from an exhibition of the entire group.

Most people think I paint fast. I paint very slowly.

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.

Never, even as a child, would I bend to a rule.

If the world really looks like that I will paint no more!

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.

What can be said about a man who is interested in nothing but his painting? It's a pity if a man can only interest himself in one thing. But I can't do any thing else. I have only one interest.

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've said it before and can only repeat that I owe everything to Boudin and I attribute my success to him. I came to be fascinated by his studies, the products of what I call instantaneity.

One is too taken up with all that one sees and hears in Paris, however strong one is, and what I do here [in Etretat] will at least have the merit of being unlike anyone else, at least I believe so, because it will simply be the expression of what I, and only I, have felt.

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.

It seems to me that when I see nature I see it ready-made, completely written - but then, try to do it!

The creditors are proving impossible to deal with and short of a sudden appearance on the scene of wealthy art patrons, we are going to be turned out of this dear little house where I led a simple life and was able to work so well. I do not know what will become of us.

I am enslaved to my work, always wanting the impossible, and never, I believe, have I been less favoured by the endlessly changeable weather.

It is difficult to stop in time because one gets carried away. But I have that strength; it is the only strength I have.

I'm very happy, very delighted. I'm setting to like a fighting cockerel, for I'm surrounded here by all that I love.

Gardening was something I learned in my youth when I was unhappy. I perhaps owe having become a painter to flowers.

Getting up at 4 in the morning, I slave away all day until by the evening I'm exhausted, and I end by forgetting all my responsibilities, thinking only of the work I've set out to do.

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.

I would love to do orange and lemon trees silhouetted against the blue sea, but I cannot find them the way I want them.

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 think only of my painting, and if I were to drop it, I think I'd go crazy.

I know well enough in advance that you'll find my paintings perfect. I know that if they are exhibited they'll be a great success, but I couldn't be more indifferent to it since I know they are bad, I'm certain of it.

I've spent so long on some paintings that I no longer know what to think of them, and I am definitely getting harder to please; nothing satisfies me.

It would be asking too much to want to sell only to connoisseurs - that way starvation lies.

Work is nearly always a torture. If I could find something else I would be much happier, because I could use this other interest as a form of relaxation. Now I cannot relax.

I've always refused requests even from friends to employ a technique I know nothing about.

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.

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.

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.

You might perhaps like to see the few canvases I was able to save from the bailiffs and the rest, since I thought you might be so good as to help me a little, as I am in quite a desperate state, and the worst is that I can no longer even work.

I'm not lacking for enthusiasm as you can see, given that I have something like 65 canvases covered with paint and I'll be needing more since the place is quite out of the ordinary; so I'm going to order some more canvases.

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.

Ninety per cent of the theory of Impressionist painting is in . . . Ruskin's Elements.

I've only myself to blame for it, my impotence most of all and my weakness. If I do any good work now it will be only by chance.

Despite my extremely modest prices, dealers and art lovers are turning their backs on me. It is very depressing to see the lack of interest shown in an art object which has no market value.

The Thames was all gold. God it was beautiful, so fine that I began working a frenzy, following the sun and its reflections on the water.

One day I am satisfied, the next day I find it all bad; still I hope that some day I will find some of them good.

For almost two months now I've been struggling away with no result.

Thanks to my work everything's going well; it's a great consolation.

What could be said about me...a man to whom only his painting matters? And of course his garden and his flowers as well.

It is only too easy to catch people's attention by doing something worse than anyone else has dared to do it before.

No, I'm not a great painter. Neither am I a great poet.

I will bring lots of studies back with me so I can work on some big things at home.

I do what I can to convey what I experience before nature and most often, in order to succeed in conveying what I feel, I totally forget the most elementary rules of painting, if they exist that is.

As for myself, I met with as much success as I ever could have wanted. In other words, I was enthusiastically run-down by every critic of the period.

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.

What is it that's taken hold of me, for me to carry on like this in relentless pursuit of something beyond my powers?

I insist upon 'doing it alone'... I have always worked better alone and from my own impressions.

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.

I have made tremendous efforts to work in a darker register and express the sinister and tragic quality of the place, given my natural tendency to work in light and pale tones.