Skip to content

My first pictures were done by instinct, the others with more method perhaps. Instinct which nourishes method can often be superior to a method which nourishes instinct.

— Pierre Bonnard

Another quote →

More quotes by Pierre Bonnard

It would bother me if my canvases were stretched onto a frame. I never know in advance what dimensions I am going to choose.

Colour has a logic as exact as that of form. One must not give up before capturing that first impression.

Konstrevy (1937)

I have all my subjects to hand. I go back and look at them. I take notes. Then I go home. And before I start painting I reflect, I dream.

I work in the mornings and in the afternoons I go to the Latin Quarter. It is a long way from the Batignolles district to the Pantheon: Fortunately there is the Metro. It amuses me to see the people squashed together, and among them are some pretty faces which I draw in the evenings, from memory, in my sketchbook.

All Pierre Bonnard quotes →

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Pierre Bonnard (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.