Edgar Degas Quotes

An artist is a deception.. ..an artist is only an artist at certain times, by an effort of will.. ..the study of nature is a cliché; isn't Manet the living proof? For although he prided himself on slavishly copying nature, he was the most inadequate painter in the world, not making a single brushstroke without reference to the old masters; for instance, he refrained from drawing fingernails because Frans Hals did not draw them.

Je voudrais être illustre et inconnu.

Oh! Women can never forgive me. They hate me, they can feel that I ‘m disarming them. I show them without their coquetry, in the states of animals cleaning themselves... ...I'm sure of it; they see me as the enemy. Fortunately, since if they did like me, that would be the end of me.

villas with columns in different styles [in Louisiana, America] painted white, in gardens of magnolias, orange trees, banana trees, negroes in old clothes like characters from La Belle Jardiniere.. ..rosy white children in black [negro] arms.. ..a brilliant light which streams my eyes.. ..the Negresses of all shades, holding in their arms little white babies, so white, against white houses with columns of fluted wood and in gardens of orange trees. [quote on his journey through America during 1872]

Art is vice. You don't wed it, you rape it.

It is all well and good to copy what one sees, but it is much better to draw only what remains in one's memory. This is a transformation in which imagination and memory collaborate.

I have been singularly hard with myself. I have had to be. You must realize that this is so, since you have, at times, reproached me for it, and were astonished because I had so little confidence in myself. I have been, or seemed, hard with everyone because I was carried away by a sort of brutality born of my distrust in myself and my ill-humor. I have felt so badly equipped, so soft, in spite of the fact that my attitude towards art seemed to me so just. I was disgusted with everyone, and especially myself. I ask your pardon, then, if, with this damned art as an excuse, I have wounded your noble and intelligent spirit; perhaps even your heart..

It requires courage to make a frontal attack on nature through the broad planes and the large lines and it is cowardly to do it by the facets and details. It is a battle.

Even working from nature you have to compose.

[make drawings of] series of instruments and players; their shapes, twisting of the hands, arms and neck of the violinist; for example, puffing out and hollowing of the cheeks of bassoonists, oboists, etc..

I believe Corot painted a tree better that any of us, but still I find him superior in his figures.

Une peinture, c'est d'abord un produit de l'imagination de l'artiste, ce ne doit jamais être une copie. Si, ensuite, on peut y ajouter deux ou trois accents de nature, evidemment ca ne fait pas de mal.

Anyone would think paintings were made like speculations on the stock market, out of the frictions of ambitious young people... ...it sharpens the mind, but clouds your judgement.

Il faut avoir une haute idée, non pas de ce qu'on fait, mais de ce qu'on pourra faire un jour; sans quoi ce n'est pas la peine de travailler.

..women... ...their way of observing, combining, sensing the way they dress. They compare a thousand of more visible things with one another than a man does.