Painters From France

"Renoir is a great success on the [Paris'] Salon; I think he is 'launched'. All the better! It's a very hard life, being poor."

"I had a long conversation with Renoir. He admitted to me that everybody, Durand-Ruell and his former collectors attacked him, deploring his attempts to go beyond his romantic period. He seems to be very sensitive to what we think of his show; I told him that for us the search for unity was the end towards which every intelligent artist must bend his efforts, and that even with great faults it was more intelligent and more artistic to do this than to remain enclosed in romanticism. Well, now he doesn't get any more portraits to do."

"He [Renoir] fears neither rain nor mud; he wants to paint a large canvas of naked boys playing with the sunlight playing on them; for this he wants it not to be too hot, and for there to be some sun; the children want there to be no wind and for it not to be cold, so they can pose naked in the water for two or three hours."

"It gives my brain a rest, painting flowers. I don't feel the same tension as when I have a model in front of me. When I paint flowers, I put on colours and try out values boldly, without worrying about wasting a canvas. I wouldn't dare to do it with a figure; I'd be afraid of spoiling the whole thing. And the experience I gain this way is then applied to my pictures."

"Gazing at Renoir's water you feel blisters on your palm as if you had been rowing."

"He [Renoir] has no talent at all, that boy! You, who are his friend, tell him please to give up painting."

"Landscapes are useful to a figure painter, too; out-of-doors one uses colours one would never think of in the weaker studio light. But landscape painting is a thankless job; you waste half a day for the sake of one hour's painting. You only finish one painting out of ten, because the weather keeps changing. You start work on a sunlight effect and it comes on to rain – or you had a few clouds in the sky, and the wind blows them away. It's always the same story!"

"I have a dream a picture of the bathing spot at the Grenouillere, for which I've made a few poor sketches, but it is a dream. Renoir, who has just spent two months here, also wants to do this painting."

"If you could see what these flowers are. [ Morandi is watching flowers in the corner of a reproduction of a painting by w:El Greco – beneath the feet of angels and saints]. No modern painter has painted flowers like these. Perhaps only Renoir."

"They've found fault with me enough, in all conscience, for putting violet shadows on bodies."

"I can manage very well with the first grubby backside [of the model] which comes along – provided I find a skin which takes the light well."

"What a charming girl! And what a skin! She positively radiated light around her."

"People will keep on taking them for theorists, when all they wanted was to paint in gay, bright colours, like the old masters."

"They tell you that a tree is only a combination of chemical elements. I prefer to believe that God created it, and that it is inhabited by a nymph."

"He Corot was always surrounded by a crowd of fools and I didn't want to get caught up in it. I admired him from a distance."

"I wanted to tell you that in about 1883 there occurred a kind of break in my work. I had got to the end of 'Impressionism', and I had come to the conclusion that I didn't either how to paint or how to draw. In short, I had come to a dead end."

"It was a perpetual holiday – and what an assortment of people. You could still enjoy yourself in those days! Machinery didn't take up the whole of life; there was time for living, and we made the most of it.. .I found as many magnificent girls to paint as I wanted; in those days one wasn't reduced to following a little model around for an hour and then being treated as a disgusting old man at the end of it."

"What seems most significant to me about our movement is that we have freed painting from the importance of the subject. I am at liberty to paint flowers and call them flowers, without their needing to tell a story."

"One morning one of us had run out of black; and that was the birth of Impressionism."

"..not exactly prostitutes, but a class of unattached young women, characteristic of the Parisian scene before and after the Empire, changing lovers easily, satisfying any whim, going nonchalantly from a mansion in the Champs-Elyseées to a garret in the Batignolles. [describing the place w:Bain à la Grenouillère at Croissy-sur-Seine and the women there, where Renoir together with Monet painted in open air and used them as models in their paintings 'la Grenouillère', 1868-69]"

"About 1883 a kind of break occurred in my work. I had wrung Impressionism dry, and had come to the conclusion that I knew neither how to paint nor how to draw. In a word, I was at an impasse"

"Berthe Morisot was a painter full of eighteenth-century delicacy and grace; in a word, the last elegant and 'feminine' artists since Fragonard."

"For me, a painting must be a pleasant thing, joyous and pretty - yes, pretty. There are too many unpleasant things in life for us to fabricate still more."

"The artist who uses the least of what is called imagination, will be the greatest!"

"I would never have taken up painting if women did not have breasts."

"What wonderful things [Renoir is reacting on Corot's painting 'Interior of Chartres Cathedral' and Delacroix's 'Interior of M. de Mornay’s house', – he saw in 1919 from his wheelchair, in the reopened painting-rooms of the Louvre]. There isn’t a single big picture worth any more than these two little ones.. .The Director [of the Louvre] was so charming to me. I wish I could have thanked him properly. If you meet him, tell him how much I enjoyed my visit. If I'd presented myself at the Louvre in my wheelchair thirty years ago, they'd have shot me out fast enough! You see, one has to live a long time to see such changes. I've been one of the lucky ones. [December 1919, Renoir died]"

"Give me that palette.. ..those two woodcocks.. ..turn this one's head to the left.. ..give me back my palette.. ..I can't paint that beak.. ..Quick, some paint.. ..change the position of those woodcocks..."

"There is something in painting which cannot be explained, and that something is the essential. You come to Nature with your theories, and she knocks them all flat."

"I want to give something [a painting to museum The Luxembourg in Paris, c. 1910] I can't be sure of doing again. I could do ten more nudes like that one [a large nude painting, suggested by Georges Riviere], whenever I liked.. .This one turned out well. I don't think I'd be able to do that again."

"You know how I feel painting a skin which won't take the light well. And on top of that, it was fashionable at the time for women to be pale, so Madame de Bonnieres was as pale as wax, you may be sure. I kept saying to myself 'If only she could get a good steak inside her, just once!'.. ..and her hands! She put them in water before the sitting, to accentuate their whiteness.. .Just imagine! I come across one of the most charming women it is possible to meet, and she doesn't want to have any colour in her cheeks!"

"There are scarcely fifteen art-collectors in Paris capable of liking a painter without the backing of the Salon. There are eighty thousands of them who wouldn't buy a thing from a painter who is not in the [Paris'] Salon. I am not going to be so foolish as to condemn a thing just because of where it happens to be. In short, I'm not going to waste my time bearing a grudge against the Salon – I don't even want to look as if I do. To my mind, one must simply paint as well as one possibly can – and that's all."

"The pain passes but the beauty remains."

"I arrange my subject as I want it, then I go ahead and paint it, like a child. I want a red to be sonorous—to sound, like a bell; if it doesn't turn out that way, I put more reds or other colors till I get it. I am no cleverer than that. I have no rules and no methods; any one can look over my materials or watch how I paint—he will see that I have no secrets. I look at a nude; there are myriads of tiny tints. I must find the ones that will make the flesh on my canvas live and quiver. Nowadays they want to explain everything. But if they could explain a picture it wouldn't be art. Shall I tell you what I think are the two qualities of a work of art? It must be indescribable and it must be inimitable. ...So in our Gothic architecture: each column is a work of art, because the old French monk who set it up and carved its capital did what he liked—not doing everything alike, as... when things are made by machinery or by rules, but each thing different—like the trees in the forest. The work of art must seize upon you, wrap you up in itself, carry you away. It is the means by which the artist conveys his passion; it is the current which he puts forth which sweeps you along in his passion."

"What I like so much about Corot is that he can say everything with a bit of tree; and it was Corot himself that I found [back] in the museum of Naples – in the simplicity of the work of Pompeii and the Egyptians. These priestesses in their silver-grey tunics are just like Corot's nymphs."

"I studied a good deal in the museum at Naples; the Pompeian paintings are extremely interesting from every aspect. So I am staying in the sun – not to paint portraits but while I am warming myself and looking hard at things I hope I will have acquired some of the grandeur and simplicity of the old masters. Raphael didn't work out-of-doors, but he studied the sunlight all the same – his frescoes are full of it. So, by looking around outside, I have finished by seeing only the broad harmonies, and am no longer preoccupied with the little details, which only extinguish the sunlight, instead of increasing its brilliance. I hope therefore, when I get back to Paris, to produce something which will be the outcome of all these general studies, and to give you the benefit of them [in a letter written during his three-weeks-stay, working with Paul Cezanne at l'Estaque, near Marseille]"

"Out-of-doors there is a greater variety of light than in the studio, where the light is always the same. But that is just the trouble; one is carried away by the light, and besides, one can't see what one is doing."

"How wonderful the Doges' palace is! That pink and white marble must have been a bit cold at first, but it was magical for me, seeing it gilded by several centuries of sunlight! And the basilica of San Marco! That was what converted me from those cold Italian Renaissance churches.. ..as soon as one goes into San Marco one feels one is in a real place of worship – that gentle filtered light and those magnificent mosaics and the great Byzantine Christ with the grey aureole! If one hasn't been in San Marco it is impossible to imagine the beauty of heavy pillars and columns without any moulding!"

"I am still going through an experimental stage. I'm not happy, and I keep scrubbing out and scrubbing out again. I hope this mania will pass.. .I'm like the children at school; the clean page has to be filled with good writing, and splash – a mess! I'm still making messes and I'm forty years old."

"I went to see this picture [Raphael's painting 'Madonna della Sedia' which Renoir saw in Florence in 1882] just to have a good laugh – and I found myself in front of the most wonderfully free, solid, simple, alive painting it is possible to imagine – arms and legs of real flesh, and what a touching expression of maternal tenderness."

"Shall I tell you what I have seen in Venice? Right – here goes. Take a boat along the Seine to the Quai des Orfevres, or opposite the Tuileries [Paris] and you will see Venice. For the Museums, go to the Louvre, For Veronese, go to the Louvre,- but not for Tiepolo, whom I didn't know; only it is a bit dear at the price. No – that isn't true; it is very, very beautiful, when the weather is fine. The lagoon and San Marco – splendid; the Doges' palace, splendid. As for the rest, I'd rather have Saint German l'Auxerrois."

"..to express himself well, the artist should be hidden.. .The trouble is that if an artist knows he has genius, he's done for. The only salvation is to work like a labourer, and not have delusions of grandeur."

".Here [ Guernsey ] people bath among the rocks which serve as cabins, since there's nothing else; nothing is more attractive than this mixture of women and men crowded on these rocks. One would belief oneself in a landscape by Watteau rather than in the real world. So I'll have a source of real and graceful motives which I will be able to make use of. Some enchanting bathing-costumes.. .Nothing is more amusing when one is strolling through these rocks, than to surprise young girls getting ready to bathe.. .Despite the small number of things that I'll be able to bring back [to Paris], I hope to be able to give you an idea of these charming things."

"Nature abhors a vacuum, say the physicists. They could complete their axiom by adding that it has no less a horror of regularity. Observers know in effect that in spite of the apparent simplicity of the laws which preside at their formulation, the works of nature are infinitely varied, from the most important to the least... At this time when our French art, still at the beginning of this century so full of penetrating charm and exquisite fantasy, is perishing because of regularity, dryness, and the mania of false perfection that now tends to make the unadorned cleanliness of the engineer into the ideal, we think it is useful to react promptly against the mortal doctrines which threaten to annihilate it..."

"If I was accused of neglecting my art, or sacrificing my ideas for the sake of stupid ambition, then I would understand the critics; but as that isn't the case, there is nothing to be said. I sent a picture to the Salon for purely commercial reasons. Anyway, it is like some medicines – even if it does no good, it does no harm. [other impressionist artists then refused to send in their work to the Salon]"

"It [his participating in the 7th exhibition of the Impressionists, combined with showing his work on the official Salon] isn't exactly a joy, but as I have said, it lets me out of the revolutionary side of the business, which I'm nervous of.. .It's a little weakness which I hope will be forgiven me [by the other impressionists].. .Delacroix used to say, quite rightly, that a painter should win as many honours as possible."

"Alas I shall very probably not be able to dine with you [madame Charpentier who frequently had receptions in Paris which Renoir frequently visited]. I began a portrait this morning; I begin another this evening, and it is extremely likely that I shall have a third to do afterwards. If I have to stay for dinner, and begin tomorrow, all these people will go away, and my head is in a complete muddle with them."

"You haven't time to think about the composition. In working directly from nature, the painter ends up by simply aiming at an effect, and not composing the picture at all; and he soon becomes monotonous."

"One day, while I was painting a landscape in the neighbourhood of Algiers [March 1881] I saw a man approaching who seemed to be dressed in purple and cloth-of-gold.. .When the traveler reached me, my illusion vanished; my emir was nothing but a flea-bitten beggar. The sun, the divine sun had enriched him with its light.. .It's always the same in Algeria. The magic of the sun transmutes the palm-trees into gold, the water seems full of diamonds and men become the Kings from the East."

"He [ Richard Wagner ] was very happy but very nervous [Renoir proposed him to paint his portrait].. .In short, I think I spent my time well, thirty five minutes is not long, but if I had stopped sooner it would have been better, because my model [Wagner] ended up by losing some of his good humor, and he became stiff. I followed these changes too closely [in the portrait].. .At the end Wagner asked to see it. He said 'Ah! Ah! It's true that I look like a Protestant minister'. But I [Renoir] was very happy it wasn't too much of a flop: There is something of that admirable face in it'"

"[ Bazille..] had not died romantically, galloping over a Delacroix' battlefield.. ..but stupidly, during the retreat, on a muddy road.. ..that pure-hearted gentle knight.. [quote, shortly after 1870, on the death of Bazille]."