Claude Monet Quotes

It took me a long time to understand my water lilies.. .I planted them for pleasure, and grew them without thinking of painting them.. You don't absorb a landscape in a day.. .And then, all of a sudden, I had the revelation of the enchantment of my pond. I took up my palette.

'..learn to draw: that's where most of you [Troyon's pupils] are falling down today.. ..draw with all your might; you can never learn too much. However, don’t neglect painting, go to the country from time to time and make studies and above all develop them..' [Monet is quoting in his letter Troyon, a friend of Boudin in Paris]

I climb up, go down again, then climb up once more; between all my studies, as a relaxation I explore every footpath, always curious to see something new.

The following week, when he Toulmouche passed in front of me, he sat down and squarely positioned on my chair, looked at my piece. I could then see him turn around, inclining his serious face with a satisfied air and I heard him say to me while smiling: "Not bad, not at all bad this, but it is too much like the real model. You have a stocky man and you depict him as stocky.. .Nature, my friend, serves well as a means to study but offers no real interest. Style is the only thing that matters." I was flabbergasted. The truth, life, nature - all that provoked emotions in me - all that constituted for me the real essence and the unique "raison d'être" of art, did not exist for this man!

My dear Pissarro, Forgive me for not answering your first letter earlier, but I 'm starting to work full steam ahead and have hardly any time. I received your second letter this morning and I see that you are going to great pains on my behalf and getting nowhere: I'm sorry to be giving you so much trouble; so drop the whole thing, and I'll ask Durand-Ruel if he could see to it for me, he might be able to get rid of these damn frames. I see that you are definitely going to leave that delightful country for good. Where are you going to, Paris or Louveciennes? I hope you'll write and let me know...

These palms are driving me crazy; the motifs are extremely difficult to seize, to put on canvas; it's so bushy everywhere, although delightful to the eye.. .I would like to do orange and lemon trees silhouetted against the blue sea, but cannot find them as I would like.

I'm very sorry to inconvenience you [ the art dealers G. and J. Berheim-Jeune ], but I find it impossible to supply you with any more Venice pictures. It was useless trying to persuade my self otherwise, the work that's left is too poor for exhibition. Don't insist.. .I've enough good sense in me to know whether what I'm doing is good or bad, and it' utterly bad, and I can't believe that people of taste, if they have any knowledge at all, could see any value in it. Things have been dragging on like this for far too long..

I am absolutely sickened with and demoralized by this life, I've been leading for so long. When you get to my age, there is nothing more to look forward to. Unhappy we are, unhappy we'll stay. Each day brings its tribulations and each day difficulties arise.. .So I'm giving up the struggle once and for all, abandoning all hope of success.. .I hear my friends are preparing another exhibition this year [the Impressionists, in Paris, 1880] but I'm ruling out the possibility of participating in it, as I just don't have anything worth showing.

By way of news, I can tell you that Couture, that bad-tempered fellow, has completely given up painting. It's no great pity; in this exhibition, he had some really bad paintings.

a remark of Monet, quoted by Ambroise Vollard, as quoted in Discovering Art, – The life time and work of the World’s greatest Artists, MONET; K.E. Sullivan, Brockhamptonpress, London 2004, p. 44

My only merit lies in having painted directly in front of nature, seeking to render my impressions of the most fleeting effects, and I still very much regret having caused the naming of a group whose majority had nothing impressionist about it.

In Paris one is too preoccupied by what one sees and what one hears, however strong one is; what I am doing here has, I think, the merit of not resembling anyone, because it is simply the expression of what I myself have experienced.

It seems to me, when I see nature, that I see it ready made, completely written — but then, try to do it! All this proves that one must think of nothing but them [impressions]; it is by dint of observation and reflection that one makes discoveries.

The sea is superb, but the cliffs don't match up to those at Fecamp. Here I'll be certain to do more boats.

I was born undisciplined. Never, even as a child, could I be made to obey a set rule. What little I know I learned at home. School was always like a prison to me, I could never bring myself to stay there, even four hours a day, when the sun was shining and the sea was so tempting, and it was such fun scrambling over cliffs and paddling in the shallows. Such, to the great despair of my parents, was the unruly but healthy life I lived until I was fourteen or fifteen. In the meantime I somehow picked up the rudiments of reading, writing and arithmetic, with a smattering of spelling. And there my schooling ended. It never worried me very much because I always had plenty of amusements on the side. I doodled in the margins of my books, I decorated our blue copy paper with ultra-fantastic drawings, and I drew the faces and profiles of my schoolmasters as outrageously as I could, distorting them out of all recognition.