Edgar Degas Quotes

The study of nature is of no significance, for painting is a conventional art, and it is infinitely more worthwhile to learn to draw after w:Holbein.

Even working from nature you have to compose.

It is very good to copy what one sees; it is much better to draw what you can't see any more but is in your memory. It is a transformation in which imagination and memory work together. You only reproduce what struck you, that is to say the necessary.

Everybody has talent at
twenty-five. The difficult thing is to have it at fifty.

A painting is above all a product of the artist's imagination, it must never be a copy. If, at a later stage, he wants to add two or three touches from nature, of course it doesn't spoil anything.

Poor Gauguin, 'way off there on his island! I'll wager he spends most of his time thinking of Rue Lafitte. I advised him to go to New Orleans, but he decided it was too civilized. He had to have people around him with flowers on their heads and rings in their noses before he could feel at home. Now if I should leave my house for more than two days...

Comme nous avons mal fait de nous laisser appeler Impressionistes.

Painting is not very difficult when you don't know how; but when you know, oh! then, it's another matter.

Art is not what you see but what you make others see

What a pity we allowed ourselves to be called Impressionists.

What a delightful thing is the conversation of specialists! One understands absolutely nothing and it's charming.

In our beginnings, Fantin, Whistler and I were all on the same road, the road from Holland [Dutch 17th century painters]

You have to have a high conception, not of what you are doing, but of what you may do one day: without that, there's no point in working.

I am busy on a portrait of my self and my aunt and my two cousins, I will show it to you when you get back. I am doing it as if I were doing a picture. I've got to do it well, because I want to leave it as a memento.... The older one is really a lovely thing, the younger one has the devil in her as well as the kindness of an angel. I am doing them with their black dresses and little white pinafores which suit them delightfully. I have ideas for the picture's background running through my head. I would like a certain gracefulness with a nobleness of feeling that I don't know how to describe.

Seni bukan tentang apa yang kita lihat, tetapi tentang apa yang kita membuat orang lain lihat.