19th-century Artist Quotes

Day comes and goes, night comes and goes...
Sinking your head in hands clasped tight,
You wonder why there still comes no
Apostle of wisdom, truth and right.

Taras Shevchenko

In talking, shyness and timidity distort the very meaning of my words. I don't pretend to know anybody well. People are like shadows to me and I am like a shadow.

Divisionism is a complex system of harmony, an aesthetic rather than a technique.
The point is only a means.
To divide is to seek the power and harmony of color, through representing colored light by pure elements, and through employing the optical mixture of these pure elements, separated and proportioned according to the essential laws of contrast and graduation.

Nothing is important save the spiritual state that enables one to subjectify one's thoughts to a sensation and to think only of the sensation, all the while searching to express it.

Édouard Vuillard

I do not always find the streets interesting, so I wait until I see picturesque groups and those that compose well in relation to the whole.

There are places, just as there are people and objects... whose relationship of parts creates a mystery.

As it grows ever more complicated today, musical art seeks out combinations more dissonant, stranger, and harsher for the ear. Thus, it comes ever closer to the noise-sound.

When a Englishwoman is dressed, she is no longer a woman, she is a cathedral. You don't seduce her, you demolish her.

The most interesting part of my life is of no concern to the public.

If we view a great mountain soaring into the sky, it may excite us, evoke an uplifted feeling within us. There is an interplay of something we see outside of us with our inner response. The artist takes that response and its feelings and shapes it on canvas with paint so that when finished it contains the experience.

I have a predilection for painting that lends joyousness to a wall.

Pierre Auguste Renoir

I am essentially a painter of the kind of still life composition that communicates a sense of tranquillity and privacy, moods which I have always valued above all else.

Giorgio Morandi

The new is very ancient, one might almost say that it is always the most ancient thing there is.

Eugène Delacroix

It was the desire for living, vital expression.... which built Gothic cathedrals, which created Mozart sonatas. I believe it is going to stay that way for long time to come.

Who knows if these very pictures, now painted for maharajas, will not find their way to the museums one day.

Raja Ravi Varma

Like music my drawings transport us to the ambiguous world of the indeterminate.

The last mad throb of red just as it turns green; the ultimate shriek of orange calling all the blues of heaven for relief and support... each color almost regains the fun it must have felt within itself on forming the first rainbow.

It isn't enough to have the eyes of a gazelle... you also need the claws of a cat in order to capture your bird alive and play with it before you eat it, and so join its life to yours. This is the mystery of painting.

When you feel colors, you will understand the why of their forms.

Oscar Florianus Bluemner

Whereas formerly, before the advent of machinery, the commonest article you could pick up had a life and warmth which gave it individual interest, now everything is turned out to such a perfection of deadness that one is driven to pick up and collect, in sheer desperation, the commonest rubbish still surviving from the earlier periods.

All the best artists have shown that the greatest achievement in the production of fine color is the concealment of pigments, and not the parade of them; and we may say the same of execution.

Asher Brown Durand

...the Matisse of long ago, so alert, such a battler, always giving as good as he got.

Courbet comes in 1849 with the intention of overthrowing past art and constructing it anew. While he speaks only of realism, of which he proclaims himself the messiah, his pictures show pre-eminently those qualities which are learned in the museums.

He becomes the interpreter of the infinite, subtle qualities of the spiritual idea centering in all created things, expounding for us the laws of beauty... revealing to us glimpses of the absolute idea of perfect harmony.

Edward Mitchell Bannister

The warm green of the grass, sprinkled with flowers of many hues, is a carpet whereon we walk with noiseless tread.