French Painter Quotes

Claude Monet

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres

Pierre Auguste Renoir

Paul Cézanne

Eugène Delacroix

Édouard Manet

Jacques-Louis David

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

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...

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.

The painting develops before my eyes, unfolding its surprises as it progresses. It is this which gives me the sense of complete liberty, and for this reason I am incapable of forming a plan or making a sketch beforehand.

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

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

Cézanne showed us forms living in the reality of light; Picasso gives us a material report of their real life in the mind. He establishes a free, mobile perspective, in such a way that the shrewd mathematician Maurice Princet has deduced an entire geometry.

I never take photographs myself. I don't feel like a photographer, more like a recycler

Christian Boltanski

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

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

Pierre Auguste Renoir

Painting is an act, a sequence of movements one bears within oneself, whose source is one's inner being.

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

The first and most important thing is to remain free, free in each line you undertake, in your ideas and in your political action, in your moral conduct. The artist especially must remain free from all outer restraints.

Nature is richer than I represent it... Nature is so beautiful that when I am not tortured by poverty I am tortured by her splendor. How fortunate we are to be able to see and admire the glories of the sky and earth; if only I could be content just to admire them. But there is always the torment of struggling to reproduce them, the impossibility of creating anything within the narrow limits of painting.

Love is a disease which fills you with a desire to be desired.

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec

For me a stained glass window is a transparent partition between my heart and the heart of the world.

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

Let us strive to have eyes that see well, that see with sagacity: that is all I ask. If you want to see that leg as ugly, I know that there will be cause for you to do so, but I will tell you, "Take my eyes and you will see it as beautiful."

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres

The word "art" means harmony for me. I never speak of mathematics and never bother with the Spirit. My only science is the choice of impressions that the light in the universe furnishes to my consciousness as an artisan which I try, by imposing an Order, and Art, an appropriate representative life, to organize...

Robert Delaunay

The concept of Abstract painting is not a passing abstraction, good only for a few initiates, [but] the total expression of a new generation whose necessities it experiences and to all of whose aspirations it constitutes a response.

Painting, art in general, enchants me. It is my life. What else matters? When you put all your soul into a work, all that is noble in you, you cannot fail to find a kindred soul who understands you, and you do not need a host of such spirits. Is not that all an artist should wish for?

Camille Pissarro

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

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.