Top 80 Pierre-Auguste Renoir Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “There are two indices of genuine art: it is inimitable and it is ineffable.”

— Pierre-Auguste Renoir

52. “With a limited palette, the older painters could do just as well as today what they did was sounder.”

— Pierre-Auguste Renoir

53. “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

54. “People love to be nice, but you must give them the chance.”

— Pierre-Auguste Renoir

55. “I’ve never let one day go by without painting, or at least without drawing.”

— Pierre-Auguste Renoir

56. “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.”

— Pierre-Auguste Renoir

57. “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

58. “It took me twenty years to discover painting: twenty years looking at nature, and above all, going to the Louvre.”

— Pierre-Auguste Renoir

59. “A fat lot of good it would do if I told you that Titian’s courtesans make you want to caress them. Some day you’ll see the Titians for yourself, and if they have no effect on you, then you don’t understand the first thing about painting. And I wouldn’t be able to help you.”

— Pierre-Auguste Renoir

60. “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

61. “You don’t talk about paintings, you look at them.”

— Pierre-Auguste Renoir

62. “To be an artist you must learn the laws of nature.”

— Pierre-Auguste Renoir

63. “My concern has always been to paint nudes as if they were some splendid fruit.”

— Pierre-Auguste Renoir

64. “The ideas come afterwards, when the picture is finished.”

— Pierre-Auguste Renoir

65. “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.”

— Pierre-Auguste Renoir

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

— Pierre-Auguste Renoir

67. “The artist who uses the least of what is called imagination will be the greatest.”

— Pierre-Auguste Renoir

68. “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

69. “An artist must eat sparingly and give up a normal way of life.”

— Pierre-Auguste Renoir

70. “To get someone to pose, you have to be very good friends and above all speak the language.”

— Pierre-Auguste Renoir

71. “The advantage of growing old is that you become aware of your mistakes more quickly.”

— Pierre-Auguste Renoir

72. “In a few generations you can breed a racehorse. The recipe for making a man like Delacroix is less well known.”

— Pierre-Auguste Renoir

73. “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

74. “If the professional schools should succeed in producing skilled workers trained in the technique of their craft, nothing could be done with them if they had no ideal.”

— Pierre-Auguste Renoir

75. “How is it that in the so-called barbarian ages art was understood, whereas in our age of progress exactly the opposite is true?”

— Pierre-Auguste Renoir

76. “I’ve spent my life making blunders.”

— Pierre-Auguste Renoir

77. “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

78. “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

79. “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

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

— Pierre-Auguste Renoir

81. “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

82. “Do not think that it is possible to repeat another period.”

— Pierre-Auguste Renoir

83. “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

84. “There’s nothing more absurd than a “connoisseur.”

— Pierre-Auguste Renoir