Top 80 Pierre-Auguste Renoir Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “One must from time to time attempt things that are beyond one’s capacity.”

— Pierre-Auguste Renoir

Featured in: Courage Quotes

2. “The pain passes, but the beauty remains.”

— Pierre-Auguste Renoir

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

— Pierre-Auguste Renoir

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

— Pierre-Auguste Renoir

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

— Pierre-Auguste Renoir

6. “Be a good craftsman; it won’t stop you from being a genius.”

— Pierre-Auguste Renoir

7. “The simplest subjects are the immortal ones.”

— Pierre-Auguste Renoir

8. “Why shouldn’t art be pretty? There are enough unpleasant things in the world.”

— Pierre-Auguste Renoir

9. “It is after you have lost your teeth that you can afford to buy steaks.”

— Pierre-Auguste Renoir

10. “To my mind, a picture should be something pleasant, cheerful, and pretty, yes pretty! There are too many unpleasant things in life as it is without creating still more of them.”

— Pierre-Auguste Renoir

11. “Paint with joy – with the same joy that you would make love to a woman.”

— Pierre-Auguste Renoir

12. “I never think I have finished a nude until I think I could pinch it.”

— Pierre-Auguste Renoir

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

— Pierre-Auguste Renoir

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

— Pierre-Auguste Renoir

15. “I arrange my subject as I want it, then I go ahead and paint it, like a child.”

— Pierre-Auguste Renoir

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

— Pierre-Auguste Renoir

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

— Pierre-Auguste Renoir

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

— Pierre-Auguste Renoir

19. “I look at a nude. There are myriads of tiny tints. I must find the ones that will make the flesh on my canvas live and quiver.”

— Pierre-Auguste Renoir

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

— Pierre-Auguste Renoir

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

— Pierre-Auguste Renoir

22. “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.”

— Pierre-Auguste Renoir

23. “We are in a period of searchers rather than of creators.”

— Pierre-Auguste Renoir

24. “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

25. “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

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

— Pierre-Auguste Renoir

27. “White does not exist in nature.”

— Pierre-Auguste Renoir

28. “If you paint the leaf on a tree without using a model, your imagination will only supply you with a few leaves; but Nature offers you millions, all on the same tree. No two leaves are exactly the same. The artist who paints only what is in his mind must very soon repeat himself.”

— Pierre-Auguste Renoir

29. “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

30. “Photography freed painting from a lot of tiresome chores, starting with family portraits.”

— Pierre-Auguste Renoir

31. “The modern architect is, generally speaking, art’s greatest enemy.”

— Pierre-Auguste Renoir

32. “Why should beauty be suspect?”

— Pierre-Auguste Renoir

33. “It’s with my brush that I make love.”

— Pierre-Auguste Renoir

34. “It is not enough for a painter to be a clever craftsman; he must love to ‘caress’ his canvas, too.”

— Pierre-Auguste Renoir

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

— Pierre-Auguste Renoir

36. “You’ve got to be a fool to want to stop the march of time.”

— Pierre-Auguste Renoir

37. “Everybody has their reasons.”

— Pierre-Auguste Renoir

38. “Religion is everywhere. It is in the mind, in the heart, in the love you put into what you do.”

— Pierre-Auguste Renoir

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

— Pierre-Auguste Renoir

40. “I need to feel the excitement of life stirring around me, and I will always need to feel that.”

— Pierre-Auguste Renoir

41. “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

42. “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

43. “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

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

— Pierre-Auguste Renoir

45. “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

46. “I just keep painting till I feel like pinching. Then I know it’s right.”

— Pierre-Auguste Renoir

47. “The most important element in a picture cannot be defined.”

— Pierre-Auguste Renoir

48. “Shall I tell you what I think are the two qualities of a work of art? First, it must be indescribable, and second, it must be inimitable.”

— Pierre-Auguste Renoir

49. “God, the king of artists, was clumsy.”

— Pierre-Auguste Renoir

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

— Pierre-Auguste Renoir