Discover the best Claude Monet Quotes

We start with Monet's insightful, pithy and amusing observations on art.

Claude Monet's biggest skill was as a colourist. But, perhaps reassuringly for the rest of us, he didn't always find it easy.

"I say that whoever claims to have finished a canvas is terribly arrogant."

"Colours pursue me like a constant worry. They even worry me in my sleep."

"I'm chasing the merest sliver of colour. It's my own fault. I want to grasp the intangible."

"Now I really feel the landscape. I can be bold and include every tone of pink and blue: it's enchanting, it's delicious."

"What I like most of all in London is the fog."

"I'm never finished with my paintings; the further I get, the more I seek the impossible and the more powerless I feel."

"I will do water. Beautiful, blue water."

"I wear myself out and struggle with the sun. And what a sun here! It would be necessary to paint here with gold and gemstones. It is wonderful."

"Try to forget what objects you have before you - a tree, a house, a field, or whatever. Merely think, 'Here is a little square of blue, here an oblong of pink, here a streak of yellow', and paint it just s it looks to you, the exact colour and shape, until it gives you your own impression of the scene before you."

"What keeps my heart awake is colourful silence."

Here are some examples of Monet's use of colour.

Monet had some pretty interesting views of impressionism too.

"Impressionism is only direct sensation. All great painters were less or more impressionists. It is mainly a question of instinct."

"I didn't become an impressionist. As long as I can remember I have always been one."

"A good impression is lost so quickly."

"[When talking about his Water Lilies] ... The illusion of an endless whole, of water without horizon or bank."

"The richness I achieve comes from nature, the source of my inspiration."

"Everyone discusses my art and pretends to understand, as if it were necessary to understand, when it is simply necessary to love."

"I have always worked better alone and from my own impressions."

"For me, a landscape does not exist in its own right, since its appearance changes at every moment."

"I'm not performing miracles, I'm using up and wasting a lot of paint ..."

Monet was also one hell of a character. Obsessed with painting, and with a great love of food and gardening, he turned into a grumpy old man as the years wore on.

"This childhood of mine was essentially one of freedom. I was born undisciplineable."

"What can be said about a man who is interested in nothing but his painting? It's a pity if a man can only interest himself in one thing, but I can't do anything else. I have only one interest."

"Water Lilies are an extension of my life. Without the water the lilies cannot live, as I am without art."

"Colour is my day-long obsession, joy and torment. To such an extent that one day, finding myself at the deathbed of a woman who had been and still was very dear to me, I caught myself in the act of focussing on her temples and automatically analysing the succession of appropriately graded colours which death was imposing on her motionless face."

"Étretat is becoming more and more amazing...it's superb and I rage at my inability to express it all better."

"My wish is to stay always like this, living quietly in a corner of nature."

"My garden is my most beautiful masterpiece."

"Everything changes, even stone."

"The more I live, the more I regret how little I know."

"No one but [me] knows the anxiety I go through and the trouble I give myself…"

Also interesting is what people said about Monet - and it wasn't all good!

Monet was often lambasted by the critics in the 1860s and 1870s, because his impressionist style challenged the conservative art establishment. But he had his supporters, and the reviews improved in and after the 1880s.

Paul Cezanne, one of the key impressionists, had this to say about Monet:

"He'll be in the Louvre, for sure, alongside Constable and Turner. Damn it, he's even greater. He painted the iridescence of the earth."

Louis Leroy, an art critic reporting on the first impressionist exhibition, said the following about Impression: Sunrise (one of Monet's greatest works):

"Impression! Of course. There must be an impression somewhere in it. What freedom … what flexibility of style! Wallpaper in its early stages is much more finished than that."

We have mentioned above that Monet was a grumpy old man. One of his old friends, Georges Clemenceau, wrote the following in a letter to Monet after he had recovered from two cataract operations in the early 1920s:

"It's irritating for you not to be able to complain about your sight after all of your wild lamentations. Fortunately, your work 'gives poor results', and therefore you can whine about that instead, because complaining gives you the greatest joy in life."