124 Quotes by Pierre-Auguste Renoir

About 1883 something like a break occurred in my work. I had reached the end of ‘impressionism,’ and I had come to realize that I did not know how to paint or draw.

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

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 isn’t a single person or landscape or subject which doesn’t possess some interest, although it may not be immediately apparent. When a painter discovers this hidden treasure, other people are immediately struck by its beauty.

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

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.

In painting, as in the other arts, there’s not a single process, no matter how insignificant, which can be reasonably made into a formula. You come to nature with your theories, and she knocks them all flat.

It’s with my brush that I make love.

I’ve known painters who never did any good work because instead of painting their models they seduced them.