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.

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.

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 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

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

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

Frédéric Bazille

Upon first seeing a daguerreotype:

From today painting is dead.

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

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

Les Enfants Terribles [The Terrible Children].

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

Pierre Auguste Renoir

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

Eugène Delacroix

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

There is no game of chance more hazardous than marriage.

Jacques-Louis David

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

...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.

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

Christian Boltanski

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

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

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.