"In eighteenth-century art, Renoir found an echo of his convictions that man's natural proclivities were the source of art and of goodness. Once, he tells us in his writings, religion was a support for the imagination, but modern man, devoted to industry, engineering and the "false mania of perfection," has cast God out. Like John Ruskin, he believed that nature, not God, was now man's guide to spiritual and physical goodness, and like Wordsworth, he believed that nature was the place where man could free himself from the taint of civilization. There he could listen to his instinctive inner being, and by acting according to his own nature, he could rediscover nature at large. "Go and see what others have produced," reads one of his aphorisms, "but never copy anything except nature. You would be trying to enter into a temperament that is not yours and nothing that you would do would have any character.""
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Robert L. Herbert, Impressionism: Art, Leisure, and Parisian Society (1988) p. 192; citing Renoir quote from , Renoir, My Father (1962) Tr. Randolph & Dorothy Weaver, p. 244.
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Pierre-Auguste_Renoir
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Pierre-Auguste Renoir
Pierre-Auguste Renoir (25 February 1841 – 3 December 1919) was a French artist who was a leading painter in the development of the Impressionist style.
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