Pierre-Auguste Renoir quotes

Pierre-Auguste Renoir was a renowned French Impressionist painter, celebrated for his vibrant use of color and depiction of light. His works often feature lively scenes of social gatherings, landscapes, and portraits with a sense of warmth and intimacy. He became one of the central figures of the Impressionist movement and left a lasting legacy in the art world. Here are 48 of his quotes:

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

Pierre-Auguste Renoir

.. 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

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

What seems most significant to me about our movement is that we have freed painting from the importance of the subject. I am at liberty to paint flowers and call them flowers, without their needing to tell a story.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir

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

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

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

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 [back] 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

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

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

One morning one of us had run out of black; and that was the birth of Impressionism.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir

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

Pierre-Auguste Renoir

I am still going through an experimental stage. I'm not happy, and I keep scrubbing out and scrubbing out again. I hope this mania will pass... I'm like the children at school; the clean page has to be filled with good writing, and splash – a mess! I'm still making messes and I'm forty years old.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir

. Here [ Guernsey ] people bath among the rocks which serve as cabins, since there's nothing else; nothing is more attractive than this mixture of women and men crowded on these rocks. One would belief oneself in a landscape by Watteau rather than in the real world. So I'll have a source of real and graceful motives which I will be able to make use of. Some enchanting bathing-costumes... Nothing is more amusing when one is strolling through these rocks, than to surprise young girls getting ready to bathe... Despite the small number of things that I'll be able to bring back [to Paris], I hope to be able to give you an idea of these charming things.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir

I want to give something [a painting to museum The Luxembourg in Paris, c. 1910] I can't be sure of doing again. I could do ten more nudes like that one [a large nude painting, suggested by Georges Riviere], whenever I liked... This one turned out well. I don't think I'd be able to do that again.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir

Landscapes are useful to a figure painter, too; out-of-doors one uses colours one would never think of in the weaker studio light. But landscape painting is a thankless job; you waste half a day for the sake of one hour's painting. You only finish one painting out of ten, because the weather keeps changing. You start work on a sunlight effect and it comes on to rain – or you had a few clouds in the sky, and the wind blows them away. It's always the same story!

Pierre-Auguste Renoir

I wanted to tell you that in about 1883 there occurred a kind of break in my work. I had got to the end of 'Impressionism', and I had come to the conclusion that I didn't either how to paint or how to draw. In short, I had come to a dead end.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir

What wonderful things [Renoir is reacting on Corot's painting 'Interior of Chartres Cathedral' and Delacroix's 'Interior of M. de Mornay's house', – he saw in 1919 from his wheelchair, in the reopened painting-rooms of the Louvre]. There isn't a single big picture worth any more than these two little ones... The Director [of the Louvre] was so charming to me. I wish I could have thanked him properly. If you meet him, tell him how much I enjoyed my visit. If I'd presented myself at the Louvre in my wheelchair thirty years ago, they'd have shot me out fast enough! You see, one has to live a long time to see such changes. I've been one of the lucky ones.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir

.. not exactly prostitutes, but a class of unattached young women, characteristic of the Parisian scene before and after the Empire, changing lovers easily, satisfying any whim, going nonchalantly from a mansion in the Champs-Elyseées to a garret in the Batignolles. [describing the place w:Bain à la Grenouillère at Croissy-sur-Seine and the women there, where Renoir together with Monet painted in open air and used them as models in their paintings 'la Grenouillère', 1868-69].

Pierre-Auguste Renoir

Give me that palette.... those two woodcocks.... turn this one's head to the left.... give me back my palette.... I can't paint that beak.... Quick, some paint.... change the position of those woodcocks...

Pierre-Auguste Renoir

It [his participating in the 7th exhibition of the Impressionists, combined with showing his work on the official Salon] isn't exactly a joy, but as I have said, it lets me out of the revolutionary side of the business, which I'm nervous of... It's a little weakness which I hope will be forgiven me [by the other impressionists]... Delacroix used to say, quite rightly, that a painter should win as many honours as possible.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir

He Corot was always surrounded by a crowd of fools and I didn't want to get caught up in it. I admired him from a distance.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir