24 quotes
The artist who uses the least of what is called imagination, will be the greatest!
Giles Auty (1977)
People will keep on taking them for theorists, when all they wanted was to paint in gay, bright colours, like the old masters.
I would never have taken up painting if women did not have breasts.
They've found fault with me enough, in all conscience, for putting violet shadows on bodies.
One morning one of us had run out of black; and that was the birth of Impressionism.
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.
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.
Masterpieces of painting from the National Gallery of Art (1944)
What a charming girl! And what a skin! She positively radiated light around her.
Berthe Morisot was a painter full of eighteenth-century delicacy and grace; in a word, the last elegant and 'feminine' artists since Fragonard.
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.
People will keep on taking them [The French Impressionists] for theorists, when all they wanted was to paint in gay, bright colours, like the old masters.
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.
Faber Birren (1965)
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.
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.
The pain passes but the beauty remains.
..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.
Raymond Durgnat (1974)
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.
The so-called 'discoveries' of the Impressionists could not have been unknown to the old masters; and if they made no use of them, it was because all great artists have renounced the use of effects. And in simplifying nature, they made it all the greater.
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.
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.
Charles Altieri (1989)