Pierre-Auguste Renoir quotes
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Pierre-Auguste Renoir Quotes



Quotes by Pierre-Auguste Renoir - (64 quotes)

Pierre-Auguste Renoir - From the Aging category:

The advantage of growing old is that you become aware of your mistakes more quickly. (Pierre-Auguste Renoir)

Pierre-Auguste Renoir - From the Amusement category:

If it [dabbling in art] didn't amuse me, I beg you to believe that I wouldn't do it. (Pierre-Auguste Renoir)

Pierre-Auguste Renoir - From the Architecture category:

The modern architect is, generally speaking, art's greatest enemy. (Pierre-Auguste Renoir)

Pierre-Auguste Renoir - From the Artists category:

God, the king of artists, was clumsy. (Pierre-Auguste Renoir)

Pierre-Auguste Renoir - From the Beauty category:

Why should beauty be suspect? (Pierre-Auguste Renoir)

Pierre-Auguste Renoir - From the Beauty category:

Why shouldn't art be pretty? There are enough unpleasant things in the world. (Pierre-Auguste Renoir)

Pierre-Auguste Renoir - From the Belief category:

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. (Pierre-Auguste Renoir)

Pierre-Auguste Renoir - From the Brother/Sisterhood category:

-on Claude Monet...
Without him I would have given up. (Pierre-Auguste Renoir)

Pierre-Auguste Renoir - From the Character category:

Go and see what others have produced, 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. (Pierre-Auguste Renoir)

Pierre-Auguste Renoir - From the Colour category:

With a limited palette, the older painters could do just as well as today... what they did was sounder. (Pierre-Auguste Renoir)

Pierre-Auguste Renoir - From the Colour category:

I want a red to be sonorous, to sound like a bell. If it doesn't turn out that way, I add more reds and other colors until I get it. (Pierre-Auguste Renoir)

Pierre-Auguste Renoir - From the Colour category:

On the whole, the modern palette is the same as the one used by the artists of Pompeii... I mean it has not been enriched. The ancients used earths, ochres, and ivory-black – you can do anything with that palette. (Pierre-Auguste Renoir)

Pierre-Auguste Renoir - From the Colour category:

-on a Jongkind...
Such a magnificent sky, and it's nothing but white paper! (Pierre-Auguste Renoir)

Pierre-Auguste Renoir - From the Colour category:

With all their damned talk of modern painting, I've been forty years discovering that the queen of all colours is black! (Pierre-Auguste Renoir)

Pierre-Auguste Renoir - From the Colour category:

White does not exist in nature. (Pierre-Auguste Renoir)

Pierre-Auguste Renoir - From the Commerce category:

The only reward one should offer an artist is to buy his work. (Pierre-Auguste Renoir)

Pierre-Auguste Renoir - From the Complaining category:

-on Leonardo da Vinci...
He bores me. He ought to have stuck to his flying machine. (Pierre-Auguste Renoir)

Pierre-Auguste Renoir - From the Confidence category:

An artist, under pain of oblivion, must have confidence in himself, and listen only to his real master: Nature. (Pierre-Auguste Renoir)

Pierre-Auguste Renoir - From the Education category:

It took me twenty years to discover painting: twenty years looking at nature, and above all, going to the Louvre. (Pierre-Auguste Renoir)

Pierre-Auguste Renoir - From the Emotion category:

Art is about emotion; if art needs to be explained it is no longer art. (Pierre-Auguste Renoir)

Pierre-Auguste Renoir - From the Finishing category:

I never think I have finished a nude until I think I could pinch it. (Pierre-Auguste Renoir)

Pierre-Auguste Renoir - From the Frustration category:

I'm still afflicted with the malady of research. I don't like what I do, and I paint it out, and paint it out again. I hope this mania will come to an end... I'm like a child at school. The white page must always be evenly written and slap! bang! and there's a blot! I'm still blotting and I'm forty years old. (Pierre-Auguste Renoir)

Pierre-Auguste Renoir - From the Genius category:

Be a good craftsman; it won't stop you being a genius. (Pierre-Auguste Renoir)

Pierre-Auguste Renoir - From the Happiness category:

Work lovingly done is the secret of all order and all happiness. (Pierre-Auguste Renoir)

Pierre-Auguste Renoir - From the Idealism category:

If the professional schools should succeed in producing skilled workers trained in the technique of their craft, nothing could be done with them if they had no ideal. (Pierre-Auguste Renoir)

Pierre-Auguste Renoir - From the Ideas category:

The ideas come afterwards, when the picture is finished. (Pierre-Auguste Renoir)

Pierre-Auguste Renoir - From the Imagination category:

The artist who uses the least of what is called imagination will be the greatest. (Pierre-Auguste Renoir)

Pierre-Auguste Renoir - From the Impressionism category:

About 1883 something like a break occurred in my work. I had reached the end of 'impressionism,' and I had come to realize that I did not know how to paint or draw. (Pierre-Auguste Renoir)

Pierre-Auguste Renoir - From the Innocence category:

I arrange my subject as I want it, then I go ahead and paint it, like a child. (Pierre-Auguste Renoir)

Pierre-Auguste Renoir - From the Joy category:

I have a predilection for painting that lends joyousness to a wall. (Pierre-Auguste Renoir)

Pierre-Auguste Renoir - From the Joy category:

Paint with joy – with the same joy that you would make love to a woman. (Pierre-Auguste Renoir)

Pierre-Auguste Renoir - From the Life category:

I need to feel the excitement of life stirring around me, and I will always need to feel that. (Pierre-Auguste Renoir)

Pierre-Auguste Renoir - From the Limitations category:

One must from time to time attempt things that are beyond one's capacity. (Pierre-Auguste Renoir)

Pierre-Auguste Renoir - From the Masters category:

In a few generations you can breed a racehorse. The recipe for making a man like Delacroix is less well known. (Pierre-Auguste Renoir)

Pierre-Auguste Renoir - From the Methodology category:

In painting, as in the other arts, there's not a single process, no matter how insignificant, which can be reasonably made into a formula. (Pierre-Auguste Renoir)

Pierre-Auguste Renoir - From the Mistakes category:

I've spent my life making blunders. (Pierre-Auguste Renoir)

Pierre-Auguste Renoir - From the Models category:

I've known painters who never did any good work because instead of painting their models they seduced them. (Pierre-Auguste Renoir)

Pierre-Auguste Renoir - From the Museums category:

The only way to understand painting is to go and look at it. And if out of a million visitors there is even one to whom art means something, that is enough to justify museums. (Pierre-Auguste Renoir)

Pierre-Auguste Renoir - From the Nature category:

You come to nature with all your theories, and she knocks them all flat. (Pierre-Auguste Renoir)

Pierre-Auguste Renoir - From the Nudes category:

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. (Pierre-Auguste Renoir)

Pierre-Auguste Renoir - From the Nudes category:

My concern has always been to paint nudes as if they were some splendid fruit. (Pierre-Auguste Renoir)

Pierre-Auguste Renoir - From the Painting category:

I like a painting which makes me want to stroll in it. (Pierre-Auguste Renoir)

Pierre-Auguste Renoir - From the Painting category:

It is not enough for a painter to be a clever craftsman; he must love to 'caress' his canvas, too. (Pierre-Auguste Renoir)

Pierre-Auguste Renoir - From the Painting category:

-last words about painting, age 78...
I think I'm beginning to learn something about it. (Pierre-Auguste Renoir)

Pierre-Auguste Renoir - From the Passion category:

The work of art must seize upon you, wrap you up in itself and 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. (Pierre-Auguste Renoir)

Pierre-Auguste Renoir - From the Perfection category:

Regularity, order, desire for perfection destroy art. Irregularity is the basis of all art. (Pierre-Auguste Renoir)

Pierre-Auguste Renoir - From the Perfection category:

-from The Society of the Irregularists, 1884...
One can thus state, without fear of being wrong, that every truly artistic production has been conceived and executed according to the principle of irregularity. (Pierre-Auguste Renoir)

Pierre-Auguste Renoir - From the Photography category:

Photography freed painting from a lot of tiresome chores, starting with family portraits. (Pierre-Auguste Renoir)

Pierre-Auguste Renoir - From the Portraiture category:

To get someone to pose, you have to be very good friends and above all speak the language. (Pierre-Auguste Renoir)

Pierre-Auguste Renoir - From the Progress category:

Progress in painting, there's no such thing! ...One day I went and changed the yellow on my palette. Well, the result was, I floundered for ten years! (Pierre-Auguste Renoir)

Pierre-Auguste Renoir - From the Quality category:

Shall I tell you what I think are the two qualities of a work of art? First, it must be indescribable, and, second, it must be inimitable. (Pierre-Auguste Renoir)

Pierre-Auguste Renoir - From the Religion category:

Religion is everywhere. It is in the mind, in the heart, in the love you put into what you do. (Pierre-Auguste Renoir)

Pierre-Auguste Renoir - From the Rules category:

I have no rules and no methods... no secrets. (Pierre-Auguste Renoir)

Pierre-Auguste Renoir - From the Rules category:

To be an artist you must learn the laws of nature. (Pierre-Auguste Renoir)

Pierre-Auguste Renoir - From the Subject category:

The most important element in a picture cannot be defined. (Pierre-Auguste Renoir)

Pierre-Auguste Renoir - From the Success category:

I have arrived more definitely than any other painter during his lifetime; honours shower upon me from every side; artists pay me compliments on my work; there are many people to whom my position must seem enviable ... But I don't seem to have a single real friend! (Pierre-Auguste Renoir)

Pierre-Auguste Renoir - From the Suffering category:

-explaining why he still painted when his hands were twisted with arthritis...
The pain passes, but the beauty remains. (Pierre-Auguste Renoir)

Pierre-Auguste Renoir - From the Time category:

You've got to be a fool to want to stop the march of time. (Pierre-Auguste Renoir)

Pierre-Auguste Renoir - From the Timeliness category:

Do not think that it is possible to repeat another period. (Pierre-Auguste Renoir)

Pierre-Auguste Renoir - From the Trust category:

People love to be nice, but you must give them the chance. (Pierre-Auguste Renoir)

Pierre-Auguste Renoir - From the Understanding category:

A fat lot of good it would do if I told you that Titian's courtesans make you want to caress them. Some day you'll see the Titians for yourself, and if they have no effect on you, then you don't understand the first thing about painting. And I wouldn't be able to help you. (Pierre-Auguste Renoir)

Pierre-Auguste Renoir - From the Understanding category:

How is it that in the so-called barbarian ages art was understood, whereas in our age of progress exactly the opposite is true? (Pierre-Auguste Renoir)

Pierre-Auguste Renoir - From the Unknowns category:

There is something in painting which cannot be explained, and that something is essential. (Pierre-Auguste Renoir)

Pierre-Auguste Renoir - From the Words category:

You don't talk about paintings, you look at them. (Pierre-Auguste Renoir)