Inspirational Art Quotes by Impressionists Painters

I don't think there has ever been a man who treated a woman as an equal and that's all I would have asked, for I know I'm worth as much as they. -- Berthe Morisot

“I consider women who are authors, lawyers and politicians are monsters” - Pierre-Auguste Renoir Quote

I think if you shake the tree, you ought to around when the fruit falls to pick it up. -- Mary Cassatt

I'd hate to catapult myself into the presence of God or even the death angel by my own hand, having myself destroyed the life that God gave me. -- Mary Cassatt

I am the primitive of the method I have invented. -- Paul Cézanne

"With an apple I will astonish Paris." -- Paul Cézanne

When I judge art, I take my painting and put it next to a God made object like a tree or flower. If it clashes, it is not art. --Paul Cézanne

Every picture shows a spot with which the artist himself has fallen in love. -- Alfred Sisley

No Frenchman of any standing in the art world has ever taken any of these things seriously. As to Matisse, one only has to see his early works to understand him. His pictures were extremely feeble in execution and very commonplace in vision. As he is intelligent, he saw that real excellence, which would bring him consideration, was not for him on that line. -- Mary Cassatt

The purpose of painting is to decorate the walls. Therefore it has to be as rich as possible. -- Pierre-Auguste Renoir

The awareness of our own strength makes us modest. --Paul Cézanne

About the Impressionist Movement

The Impressionist style of painting developed in the late 1870s in France. The artists sought to represent objects in their atmospheric veil, enveloped with light and air; it was not to paint local colors, but the effects of light under which everything momentarily changes color. They were an intellectual and social group of painters whose members sought to bring about a radical power shift in the world of art.

The name Impressionism comes from Claude Monet's painting Impression Sunrise (Impression, soleil levant), which was part of an exhibition that included 30 young artists held in the studio of a famous photographer known as Nadar. The year was 1874 and this was the earliest Impressionist exhibit. None of the paintings sold and very few people attended the exhibit. A critic, Jules-Antoine Castagnary, used the word "impressionism" to ridicule all the paintings in the show, but the artists later embraced the word to describe their technique. It is revealing that the Impressionists preferred to be known as the "Independents, and reviled the term "Impressionist". A review of the first impressionist Exhibit: According to Mr. Castagnary "The common view that brings these artists together in a group and makes of them a collective force within our disintegrating age is their determination not to aim for perfection, but to be satisfied with a certain general aspect. Once the impression is captured, they declare their role finished. The term Japanese, which was given them first, made no sense. If one wishes to characterize and explain them with a single word, then one would have to coin the word impressionists. They are impressionists in that they do not render a landscape, but the sensation produced by the landscape. The word itself has passed into their language: in the catalogue the Sunrise by Monet is called not landscape, but impression. Thus they take leave of reality and enter the realms of idealism." Jules Castagnary, Le Siecle, April 29 1874