Pierre-Auguste Renoir Quotes

I would never have taken up painting if women did not have breasts.

And if out of a million visitors there is even one to whom art means something, that is enough to justify museums.

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.

It took me twenty years to discover painting: twenty years looking at nature, and above all, going to the Louvre.

I've spent my life making blunders.

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.

I just keep painting till I feel like pinching. Then I know it's right.

We are in a period of searchers rather than of creators.

You don't talk about paintings, you look at them.

With all their damned talk of modern painting, I've been forty years discovering that the queen of all colours is black!

Nothing costs so little, goes so far, and accomplishes so much as a single act of merciful service.

In a few generations you can breed a racehorse. The recipe for making a man like Delacroix is less well known.

God, the king of artists, was clumsy.

Regularity, order, desire for perfection destroy art. Irregularity is the basis of all art.

I had wrung impressionism dry and I finally came to the conclusion that I know neither how to paint nor how to draw.

You come to nature with all her theories, and she knocks them all flat.

Do not think that it is possible to repeat another period.

I like a painting which makes me want to stroll in it.

One must from time to time attempt things that are beyond one's capacity.

I've never let one day go by without painting, or at least without drawing.

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.

Paint with joy - with the same joy that you would make love to a woman.

Be a good craftsman; it won't stop you from being a genius.

It's with my brush that I make love.

The work of art must seize upon you, wrap you up in itself, 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.

I've been 40 years discovering that the queen of all colors was black.

Berthe Morisot was a painter full of eighteenth-century delicacy and grace; in a word, the last elegant and 'feminine' artists since Fragonard.

Work lovingly done is the secret of all order and all happiness.

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 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.

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.

One morning, one of us ran out of the black, it was the birth of Impressionism.

People will keep on taking them for theorists, when all they wanted was to paint in gay, bright colours, like the old masters.

He bores me. He ought to have stuck to his flying machine.
[On Leonardo Da Vinci]

A painter who has the feel of breasts and buttocks is saved.

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.

There are some things in painting which cannot be explained, and that something is essential.

An artist must eat sparingly and give up a normal way of life.

It is not enough for a painter to be a clever craftsman; he must love to 'caress' his canvas, too.

The modern architect is, generally speaking, art's greatest enemy.

The artist who uses the least of what is called imagination will be the greatest.

The only reward one should offer an artist is to buy his work.

To get someone to pose, you have to be very good friends and above all speak the language.

When I've painted a woman's bottom so that I want to touch it, then [the painting] is finished.

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.

I have a horror of the word 'flesh', which has become so shopworn.Why not 'meat'whilethey're about it? What I like is skin, a young girl's skin that is pink and shows that she has a good circulation.

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.

If the painter works directly from nature, he ultimately looks for nothing but momentary effects; he does not try to compose, and soon he gets monotonous.

What is to be done about these literary people, who will never understand that painting is a craft and that the material side comes first? The ideas come afterwards, when the picture is finished.

I consider that women who are authors, lawyers, and politicians are monsters.

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.

"The work of art must seize upon you ... carry you away."

With a limited palette, the older painters could do just as well as today what they did was sounder.

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!

Art is about emotion; if art needs to be explained it is no longer art.

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

People love to be nice, but you must give them the chance.

-last words about painting, age 78 ...
I think I'm beginning to learn something about it.

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.

There are quite enough unpleasant things in life without the need to manufacture more.

There are two indices of genuine art: it is inimitable and it is ineffable.

I have a predilection for painting that lends joyousness to a wall.

You've got to be a fool to want to stop the march of time.

Everybody has their reasons.