Renoir Quotes

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

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. ~ Pierre-Auguste Renoir

I've been 40 years discovering that the queen of all colors was black. ~ Pierre-Auguste Renoir

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

I would never have taken up painting if women did not have breasts. ~ Pierre-Auguste Renoir

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

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

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

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. ~ Pierre-Auguste Renoir

The only things that are important in life are the things you remember. ~ Jean Renoir

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. ~ Pierre-Auguste Renoir

A painter who has the feel of breasts and buttocks is saved. ~ Pierre-Auguste Renoir

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

The awful thing about life is this: everyone has their reasons. ~ Jean Renoir

I am against great themes and great subjects ... You can't film an idea. The camera is an instrument for recording physical impact. ~ Jean Renoir

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. ~ Pierre-Auguste Renoir

The foundation of all civilization is loitering. ~ Jean Renoir

One morning, one of us ran out of the black, it was the birth of Impressionism. ~ Pierre-Auguste Renoir

The real hell of life is everyone has his reasons. ~ Jean Renoir

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

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

Everyone has his reasons." Octave (Jean Renoir) in "The Rules of the Game. ~ Jean Renoir

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

The day may come when, contemplating a world given back to the primeval forst, a human survivor will have no means of even guessing how much intelligence Man once imposed upon the forms of the earth, when he set up the stones of Florence in the billowing expanse of the Tuscan olive-groves. No trace will be left then of the palaces that saw Michelangelo pass by, nursing his grievances against Raphael; and nothing of the little Paris cafes where Renoir once sat beside Cezanne, Van Gogh beside Gauguin. Solitude, vicegerent of Eternity, vanquishes men's dreams no less than armies, and men have known this ever since they came into being and realized that they must die. ~ Andre Malraux

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. ~ Pierre-Auguste Renoir

You come to nature with all her theories, and she knocks them all flat. ~ Pierre-Auguste Renoir

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

He winks at me and ignores me for the rest of supper, during which he instructs Ross about current diabetic treatments, corrects Maggie's perfectly pronounced Renoir as Ren-wah, and keeps fondling Kate's breasts. Okay, not exactly, but he touches her arm or hand whenever he talks or she does, and it's so frequent it's bordering on molestation. I can't believe no one's putting a stop to this. ~ Erin McCahan

There is no realism in American films. No realism, but something much better, great truth. ~ Jean Renoir

I had wrung impressionism dry and I finally came to the conclusion that I know neither how to paint nor how to draw. ~ Pierre-Auguste Renoir

I like big butts, Renoir explained to Toulouse-Lautrec. ~ Christopher Moore

Technology is mechanical and contrary to the emotions that inform a person's life. The country music field has especially been hit hard by this. All my songs have been written by people who went out of fashion years ago. Just like da Vinci and Renoir and van Gogh. Nobody paints like that anymore. But it can't be wrong to try. ~ Bob Dylan

LONDON. TRINITY TERM one week old. Implacable June weather. Fiona Maye, a High Court judge, at home on Sunday evening, supine on a chaise longue, staring past her stockinged feet toward the end of the room, toward a partial view of recessed bookshelves by the fireplace and, to one side, by a tall window, a tiny Renoir lithograph of a bather, bought by her thirty years ago for fifty pounds. Probably a fake. Below it, centered on a round walnut table, a blue vase. No memory of how she came by it. Nor when she last put flowers in it. The fireplace not lit in a year. Blackened raindrops falling irregularly into the grate with a ticking sound against balled-up yellowing newsprint. A Bokhara rug spread on wide polished floorboards. Looming at the edge of vision, a baby grand piano bearing silver-framed family photos on its deep black shine. On the floor by the chaise longue, within her reach, the draft of a judgment. ~ Ian McEwan

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

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

One should make movies innocently - the way Adam and Eve named the animals, their first day in the garden ... Learn from your own interior vision of things, as if there had never been a D.W.Griffith, or a Eisenstein, or a [John] Ford, or a [Jean] Renoir, or anybody. ~ Orson Welles

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. ~ Pierre-Auguste Renoir

I know now that he who hopes to be universal in his art must plant in his own soil. Great art is like a tree, which grows in a particular place and has a trunk, leaves, blossoms, boughs, fruit, and roots of its own. The more native art is, the more it belongs to the entire world, because taste is rooted in nature. When art is true, it is one with nature. This is the secret of primitive art and also of the art of the mastersMichelangelo, Czanne, Seurat, and Renoir. The secret of my best work is that it is Mexican. ~ Diego Rivera

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. ~ Pierre-Auguste Renoir

The most skilled hand is never anything but the servant of the mind. ~ Jean Renoir

Everybody has their reasons. ~ Pierre-Auguste Renoir

There are two indices of genuine art: it is inimitable and it is ineffable. ~ Pierre-Auguste Renoir

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

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

I've never let one day go by without painting, or at least without drawing. ~ Pierre-Auguste Renoir

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

In the neighborhood around Waseda, there were all these movie theaters, so every morning I left the house and watched movies instead of going to class. The experience of encountering films then is one of my greatest memories. Before that I'd never paid any attention to directors, but there I was taking a crash course in Ozu, Kurosawa, Naruse, Truffaut, Renoir, Fellini. Because I've always been naturally a more introspective person, I was more interested in becoming a screenwriter than a director. ~ Hirokazu Koreeda

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

The saving grace of the cinema is that with patience, and a little love, we may arrive at that wonderfully complex creature which is called man. ~ Jean Renoir

In Naples, Fla., I met a self-made man, a multimillionaire, whose round penthouse apartment is home to Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Claude Monet, Henry Moore, and Mickey Mantle. He had purchased the most coveted items auctioned by the Mantle family at Madison Square Garden in December 2003. ~ Jane Leavy

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

I considered that the world, and especially the cinema, was burdened with false gods. My task was to overthrow them. Sword in hand, I was ready to consecrate my life to the task. But the false gods are still there. My perseverance during a half-century of cinema has perhaps helped to topple a few of them. It has likewise helped me to discover that some of the gods were real, and had no need to be toppled. ~ Jean Renoir

An artist must eat sparingly and give up a normal way of life. ~ Pierre-Auguste Renoir

"The work of art must seize upon you ... carry you away." ~ Pierre-Auguste Renoir

My little Renoirs. Matisse describes having seen Renoir make these tiny canvases. When he had finished working, he would use up the color left in his brushes on them. ~ Jean Cocteau

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. ~ Pierre-Auguste Renoir

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

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

We are in a period of searchers rather than of creators. ~ Pierre-Auguste Renoir

He bores me. He ought to have stuck to his flying machine.
[On Leonardo Da Vinci] ~ Pierre-Auguste Renoir

It is universally agreed that Jean Renoir was one of the greatest of all directors, and he was also one of the warmest and most entertaining. ~ Roger Ebert

Monet, Manet, Sisley, Renoir, Van Gogh and others went outside to paint for one simple reason - it looks different outside. ~ Mike Svob

I consider that women who are authors, lawyers, and politicians are monsters. ~ Pierre-Auguste Renoir

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. ~ Pierre-Auguste Renoir

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

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

Nothing costs so little, goes so far, and accomplishes so much as a single act of merciful service. ~ Pierre-Auguste Renoir

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

It's with my brush that I make love. ~ Pierre-Auguste Renoir

I also became inspired by impressionist painters such as Renoir, and wanted to do the same sort of thing with music-portray whatever mood strikes me the way Keith Jarrett does on piano. ~ Lenny Breau

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

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

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

Is it possible to succeed without any act of betrayal? ~ Jean Renoir

How many books did Renoir write on how to paint? ~ Cyril Connolly

There is only now, today, this present moment, this point in time. Waiting for 'someday' is, like striving for perfection, really just an excuse. 'Someday' is a concept that, to quote my mentor, Jean Renoir 'exists only in the mind, not in reality. ~ Syd Field

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

You see, in this world, there is one awful thing, and that is that everyone has his reasons. ~ Jean Renoir

I like a girl with a substantial bottom,' said Renoir, drawing in the air the size bottom he preferred. ~ Christopher Moore

I like the idea of seeing a film that has the artist's hand in there,a film where you can see his strokes, you can see his working patterns. It's like going to a museum and seeing a Renoir drawing. You want to see their work and you want to see how they put it together. For me to see that in animation is really fresh, it's really exciting, it's really original. ~ Bill Plympton

There are quite enough unpleasant things in life without the need to manufacture more. ~ Pierre-Auguste Renoir

Nature is millions of things. And there are millions of ways of understanding its preoccupations. ~ Jean Renoir

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

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

Discernment gives you the ability to both appreciate the subtle beauty of a Renoir and spot a fake. ~ Hannah Anderson

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

The real hell of life is that everyone has his reasons. ~ Jean Renoir

The truly terrible thing is, everyone has his reasons ~ Jean Renoir

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

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

'Paint only what you see,' his hero Millet had admonished.
'Imagination is a burden to a painter,' Auguste Renoir had told him. 'Painters are craftsmen, not storytellers. Paint what you see.'
Ah, but what they hadn't said, hadn't warned him about, was how much you could see. ~ Christopher Moore

Among seekers of truth, painters perhaps come closest to discovering the secret of the balance of forces of the universe, and hence of man's fulfillment. ~ Jean Renoir

I just keep painting till I feel like pinching. Then I know it's right. ~ Pierre-Auguste Renoir

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

A director makes only one movie in his life. Then he breaks it up and makes it again. ~ Jean Renoir

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

He has no talent at all, that boy! You, who are his friend, tell him, please, to give up painting.

–--Manet to Monet, on Renoir--- ~ Edouard Manet

There are some things in painting which cannot be explained, and that something is essential. ~ Pierre-Auguste Renoir

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

The truly terrible thing is that everybody has their reasons. ~ Jean Renoir