19th-century Painter Quotes

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

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.

I was not able to work in the several excursions and ascensions made in the neighborhood, where it was very beautiful. One is so surprised by these grand aspects that it would be necessary to remain a long time before finding the interpretation capable of rendering them. I am going to finish the season at Auvers. There is nothing like one's natural every-day surroundings where one really takes pleasure. The pictures we do then feel the effect of their home-life, and the sweet sensations we experience in it.

Charles-François Daubigny

I wanted to revolutionise habits and contemporary life - to liberate nature, to free it from the authority of old theories and classicism... I felt a tremendous urge to re-create a new world seen through my own eyes, a world which was entirely mine.

Maurice de Vlaminck

If you should desire some news of me, Go ask the little horned toad whose home is in the dust.

The Plover and the Clover can be told apart with ease, By paying close attention to the habit of the Bees, For Entomologists aver, the Bee can be in Clover, While Etymologists concur, there is no B in Plover.

Robert William Wood

The mask means to me: freshness of color, sumptuous decoration, wild unexpected gestures, very shrill expressions, exquisite turbulence.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

Oscar Florianus Bluemner

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.

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.

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

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

Raja Ravi Varma

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.

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

Eugène Delacroix

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

I would like to make something that is real in itself that does not remind anyone of any other things, and that does not have to be explained like the letter A, for instance.

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.

The reason for the survival of the award system is purely commercial.