Claude Monet

"It was not until 1869 that I met him Manet again, but this time, we became friends immediately. From the first meeting, he invited me to join him every evening in a café of the 'Batignolles' where he and his friends would gather to talk at the end of a day spent at their studios. I would meet there, Fantin-Latour and Cézanne, Degas - who arrived shortly afterwards from Italy, the art critic Duranty, Emile Zola who was just starting-off in the literary world and a number of others. I would take Sisley, Bazille and Renoir. There was nothing more interesting than these discussions with their perpetual differences of opinion. Our mind and souls were stimulated.. .One would always leave, all the better immersed, the will stronger, our thinking more defined and clear."

"..but what a pity that I did not come here [in Venice] when I was younger and more adventurous."

"It's quite beyond my powers at my age, and yet I want to succeed in expressing what I feel."

"Since the appearance of Impressionism, the official salons, which used to be brown, have become blue, green, and red.. .But peppermint or chocolate, they are still confections."

"Nothing in the whole world is of interest to me but my painting and my flowers."

"Colours no longer looked as brilliant to me as they use to do [Monet's sight was beginning to fail], I no longer painted shades of light so correctly. Reds looked muddy to me, pinks insipid, and the intermediate or lower notes in the colour scale escaped me. As for forms, I could see them as clear as ever, and render them as decisively. At first I tried pertinacity. How many times I have remained for hours near the little bridge, exactly were we are now, in the full glare of the sun, sitting on my camp-stool, under my sunshade, forcing myself to resume my interrupted task and to recapture the freshness my palette had lost! A waste of effort. What I painted was more and more mellow.. ..and (when) I compared it with what I used to do in the old days. I would fall into a frantic rage, and I slashed all my pictures with my penknife."

"Though I remained insensitive to the subtleties and delicate gradations of colour.. ..my eyes at least did not deceive me when I drew back and looked at the subject in its broad lines, and this was the starting-point of new compositions.. .Slowly I tried my strength in innumerable rough sketches which convinced me.. .I could see as clearly as ever when it came to vivid colours isolated in a mass of dark tones. How was I to put this to use? My intentions gradually became clearer.. .I said to myself, as I made my sketches, that a series of general impressions, captured at the times of day when I had the best chance of seeing correctly, would not be without interest. I waited for the idea to consolidate, for the grouping and composition of the themes to settle themselves in my brain little by little, of their own accord; and the day when I felt I held enough cards to be able to try my luck with a real hope of success, I determined to pass to action, and did so."

"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.."

"You'll understand... that I'm chasing the merest sliver of color. It's my own fault, I want to grasp the intangible. It's terrible how the light runs out, taking color with it. Color, any color, lasts a second, sometimes three of four minutes at the most."

"I can no longer work outside because of the intensity of the light."

"I see less and less.. .I need to avoid lateral light, which darkens my colors. Nevertheless, I always paint at the times of day most propitious for me, as long as my paint tubes and brushes are not mixed up.. ..I will paint almost blind, as Beethoven composed completely deaf."

"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."

"Color is my day-long obsession, joy and torment. To such an extent indeed that one day, finding myself at the deathbed of a woman who had been and still was very dear to me, I caught myself in the act of focusing on her temples and automatically analyzing the succession of appropriately graded colors which death was imposing on her motionless face."

"I was thinking of preparing my palette and my brushes to resume work, but relapses and further bouts of pain prevented it. I'm not giving up that hope and am occupying myself with some major alterations in my studios and plans to perfect the garden [in Giverny ]. All this to show you that, with courage, I'm getting the upper hand. [three months before Monet died]"

"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."

"Impressionism is only direct sensation. All great painters were less or more impressionists. It is mainly a question of instinct, and much simpler than Sargent thinks. But he went on to agree that impressionists had noted how strong"

"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."

"I started selling my portraits. Sizing up my customer, I charged ten or twenty francs a caricature, and it worked like a charm. Within a month my clientele had doubled. Had I gone on like that I'd be a millionaire today. Soon I was looked up to in the town, I was 'somebody'. In the shop-window of the one and only frame-maker who could make out a livelihood in Le Havre, my caricatures were impudently displayed, five or six abreast, in beaded frames or behind glass like very fine works of art, and when I saw troops of bystanders gazing at them in admiration, pointing at them and crying 'Why, that's so-and-so!', I was just bursting with pride."

"I didn't become one.. .As long as I can remember I've always been one."

"I felt the need, in order to widen my field of observation and to refresh my vision in front of new sights, to take myself away for a while from the area where I was living, and to make some trips lasting several weeks in , and elsewhere.."

"One day Eugène Boudin said to me, '..appreciate the sea, the light, the blue sky'. I took his advice and together we went on long outings during which I painted constantly from nature. This was how I came to understand nature and learned to love it passionately."

"I'm half an hour late, I'll come back tomorrow."

"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"

"[about his friend Monet, in 1865] ..hard at work for some time now. His paintings has really progressed, I'm sure it will attract a lot of attention. He has sold thousands of franc's worth of paintings in the last few days, and has one or two other small commissions. He's definitely on his way."

"If I did not know how unhappy you are, I certainly would not take the trouble to respond to the letter that reached me this morning. You try to demonstrate to me that I don’t keep my promises, but you have only succeeded in proving to me your ingratitude. As far as I know I had never had the air to give you charity. I know to the contrary, better than everyone, the value of the painting that I have purchased [ Monet's painting 'Woman in the garden' - purchased by Bazille] and I very much regret not being wealthy enough to offer you better conditions (WPJ 15)"

"But what an eye Monet has, the most prodigious eye since painting began! I raise my hat to him. As for Courbet, he already had the image in his eye, ready-made. Monet used to visit him [Courbet], you know, in his early days.. ..But a touch of green, believe me, is enough to give us a landscape, just as a flesh tone will translate a face for us.."

"Monet's cliffs (in Etretat) will survive as a prodigious series, as will a hundred others of his canvases.. ..He'll be in the Louvre, for sure, alongside Constable and Turner. Damn it, he's even greater. He painted the iridescence of the earth. He's painted water. Remember those Rouen cathedrals (series of paintings of Monet of the Cathedral of Rouen).. .But where everything slips away in these pictures of Monet's, nowadays we must insert a solidity, a framework.."

"Unfortunately, the realization of my sensations is always a very painful process with me. I can't seem to express the intensity which beats in upon my senses. I haven’t at my command the magnificent richness of color which enlivens Nature.. .Look at that cloud; I should like to be able to paint that! Monet could. He had muscle."

"I said to him [to Monet, when Degas saw in 1866 for the first time Monet's landscape paintings]: 'I am off, all these 'reflets d'eaux' are making my eyes hurt'.. ..It was full of draughts; a few more and I'd have pulled the collar of my jacket up."

"There's no doubt but that without this liberté, égalité and fraternité there could not have been a Monet, Modigliani, Picasso, or Giacometti."

"The Bridge at Argenteuil... is one of the best examples of early mature Impressionism, in which the brushwork varies according to the image being created: blended mixtures for clear water, choppy aggregates for reflections, wide, dragged horizontals for boat hulls, streaky verticals for masts, finely bunched diagonals and swirls for foliage, curved and irregular dabs for clouds. These different marks are also of varied thickness. The smoother ones for sky and water are so thin as to have negligible substance, but the boats, trees, clouds, and multicolored reflections have substantial impasto. In front of the original painting... the viewer unconsciously lets the thicker strokes confer a fictitious "reality" on their images, compared to the insubstantiality of water and sky. Before Impressionism, painters had varied the direction and texture of their brushwork according to the images they defined, but for Monet these manipulations... were even more vital, because he had renounced the traditional underpinnings of modeling in light and dark. ...[T]he representation of leisure was the result of hard work."

"I thought that the painter had no right to paint so un-clearly.. ..(but) the first faint doubt as to the importance of an 'object' as the necessary element in painting.. [ Kandinsky is remembering here his early experience when he saw one of the 'Haystack' paintings of Monet for the first time in his life, in Moscow, c. 1895]."

"My dear Duret, I went to see Monet yesterday. I found him heart-broken and completely on the rocks. He asked me to find him someone who would take from ten to twenty of his paintings at their choice, for 111 fr. apiece. Shall we do it between us, making 500 fr. each? Naturally, no one, least of all he, must know that it is we who are doing it..."

"..[enabled] to touch the core, the essence of things. Even in as simple a subject, a great painter can achieve a majesty of vision and an intensity of feeling to which we [the viewer] immediately respond. [quote, c. 1937, referring to a still life by Cezanne and a river-sight with sandbank by Claude Monet he then saw at an exhibition]"

"Monet is also a great romantic; I love the romance in his work."

"I received a letter from Monet, who is in despair because he has not succeeded with the canvases on which he worked most furiously, as happened with those I did at Gisors. - My work is going better, but I am only beginning."

"Monet has been to Durand [their art-dealer in Paris] and brought the paintings he did this year [1886]; he has one in bright sunlight, it is an incomprehensible fantasy; M. Caseburne himself admitted to me that it is absolutely incoherent, blobs of white mixed with Veronese greens and yellows, and the drawing is completely lost. The other canvases are more carefully done, better, but dark grey. My 'Eragny' has more calm, and you can see in this painting the advantage of unmixed colors and clear and solid draftsmanship. I assure you I would not be afraid to show my work with Monet's. Durand says that Monet pities me because of the course I have taken [following [[w:Pointillism|Pointillism].]] So!.. .Perhaps he does, now.. ..but wait. M. Robertson [good client of Durand in the gallery] being insensitive to Monet's qualities, Durand asked me to explain to him, in English, the good points of Monet's work. I did my best, loyally and without hesitation, for despite his mistakes I know how gifted is this artist [Monet]; but M. Robertson can't stand his work: 'And who painted this horror?'"

"I say this: Monet plays his salesman's game, and it serves him; but it is not in my character to do likewise, nor is it to my interest, and it would be in contradiction above all to my conception of art. I am not a romantic! I would really have no raison d'etre, if I did not pursue a considered technique which yet leaves me free to express myself, and does not inhibit an artist who has the gift."

"..tell me whether she [Pissarro's wife] did not find Monet's things a little too dark? [Monet's paintings at the Paris exhibition, at M. Petit, May 1887]. I do not know whether I am correct in this, but these works seem to me to lack luminosity, by which I mean the light that bathes bodies in the shade as well as those in the sun. The effect is certainly decorative, but there is little finesse and crudities are prominent; I do not know if it belongs to our vision which aspires to harmony and demands an art which while not decoration is yet decorative."

"He [ Bracquemond ] also noted the crude execution in some of the Monet's [paintings at the Paris Impressionism-exhibition at M. Petit, May 1887], particularly in one of the Holland canvases [Monet painted them in May 1876], in which the impasto is so thick that an unnatural light is added to the canvas, you can hardly conceive how objectionable it is to me, - even worse is the swept and meager sky - no, I [ Camille Pissarro ] cannot accept this approach to art. - But the walls in the picture seem to me very well treated."

"This is a bad moment for me, Durand doesn't take my paintings. Miss Cassatt was much surprised to hear that he no longer buys my work, it seems that he sells a great deal. - But for the moment people want nothing but 'Monet's', apparently he can't paint enough pictures to meet the demand. Worst of all they all want 'Sheaves in the Setting Sun'! always the same story, everything he does goes to America at prices of four, five and six thousand francs. All this comes, as Durand remarked to me, from not shocking the collectors!"

"I saw yesterday; he sends you [Pissarro's son Lucien] his best. He mentioned that Monet was going to have a one-man show at Durand-Ruel's, and exhibit nothing but Sheaves. The clerk at Boussod & Valadon told me that the collectors want only Sheaves. I don't understand how Monet can submit to this demand that he repeat himself — such is the terrible consequence of success! It happens all the time!"

"At Argenteuil [where Monet had built a little wooden cabin on his studio-boat], Renoir] and Monet resumed their old habit of painting the same views, seated side by side. Life was beginning to change for the better; 1872 seemed to be a year not only for recovery [from the war years] but also for putting down roots."

"Transport these Mornings on the Seine, Wheatstacks, and Cathedrals around the world and no matter where these paintings will be, the spectator will admire and envy a country where the hand of man built such monuments in the middle of such beautiful sites. Glory thus to the artist, who with the aid of a few lines and some dashes of color can so grandly synthesize the land where he lives."

"Francesco Filippini"