19th-century Painter Quotes

Vincent van Gogh

Pablo Picasso

Claude Monet

Pierre Auguste Renoir

Paul Cézanne

Eugène Delacroix

Édouard Manet

What is Drawing? It is working oneself through an invisible iron wall that seems to stand between what one feels and what one can do.

Letter to his brother Theo

Vincent van Gogh

I don't believe in making pencil sketches and then painting landscape in your studio. You must be right under the sky.

William Merritt Chase

I cannot now change my style, which I acquired, as you can imagine, by dint of labour.

No one could have less faith in the absolute and definitive importance of the work created by man, because I believe that this world is nothing but a dream...

The artist discards all theories, both his own and those of others. He forgets everything when he is in front of his canvas.

Georges Rouault

Knowing how to paint and to use one's colors rightly has not any connection with originality. This originality consists in properly expressing your own impressions.

July 13, 1954 was the most tragic day of my life. I had lost my beloved Frida forever. To late now I realized that the most wonderful part of my life had been my love for Frida.

Impressionism was the name given to a certain form of observation when Monet, not content with using his eyes to see what things were or what they looked like as everybody had done before him, turned his attention to noting what took place on his own retina (as an oculist would test his own vision).

John Singer Sargent

Art is something subversive. It's something that should not be free. Art and liberty, like the fire of Prometheus, are things that one must steal, to be used against the established order.

What is called a sincere work [of art] is one that is endowed with enough strength to give reality to an illusion.

There is nothing that special to see when looking at me. I'm a painter who paints day in day out, from morning till evening - figure pictures and landscapes, more rarely portraits.

One has to seek Beauty and Truth, Sir! As I always say to my pupils, you have to work to the finish. There's only one kind of painting. It is the painting that presents the eye with perfection, the kind of beautiful and impeccable enamel you find in Veronese and Titian.

William-Adolphe Bouguereau

The ideal artist is he who knows everything, feels everything, experiences everything, and retains his experience in a spirit of wonder and feeds upon it with creative lust.

Art is no longer a purely visual experience.. it is a work of our intellect triggered by nature... the imagination again become the queen of our strengths and we liberate our sensitivity.

I was extremely timid and to be made to feel that I was not wanted, although in a place where I had every right to be, even months afterwards caused me sometimes weeks of pain. Every time any one of these disagreeable incidents came into my mind, my heart sank, and I was anew tortured by the thought of what I had endured, almost as much as the incident itself.

Henry Ossawa Tanner

It is really too ridiculous for a reasonably intelligent person to expose himself to this kind of administrative caprice.

Frédéric Bazille

Who is this Monet whose name sounds just like mine and is taking advantage of my notoriety?

Remark recorded by Théodore Duret at the Paris Salon of 1865

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

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.

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

Pierre Auguste Renoir