Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841–1919) was a leading figure in the Impressionist movement, renowned for his vibrant and luminous paintings of everyday life. Born in Limoges, France, Renoir’s works captured the essence of late 19th-century Parisian society, portraying scenes of leisure, social gatherings, and intimate moments with a sense of warmth and vitality. His mastery of light, color, and brushwork, particularly in his portrayal of the human figure, exemplified his distinctive style. Despite facing criticism in his lifetime, Renoir’s art achieved widespread acclaim, influencing generations of painters with its timeless beauty and emotional resonance. Today, his works are celebrated as masterpieces of Impressionism, cherished for their radiant charm and enduring appeal.
Pierre-Auguste Renoir Quotes
1. “One must from time to time attempt things that are beyond one’s capacity.”
— Pierre-Auguste Renoir
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
51. “The only reward one should offer an artist is to buy his work.”
— Pierre-Auguste Renoir
52. “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
53. “With a limited palette, the older painters could do just as well as today what they did was sounder.”
— 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. “To be an artist you must learn the laws of nature.”
— Pierre-Auguste Renoir
62. “My concern has always been to paint nudes as if they were some splendid fruit.”
— Pierre-Auguste Renoir
63. “You don’t talk about paintings, you look at them.”
— Pierre-Auguste Renoir
64. “The ideas come afterwards, when the picture is finished.”
— Pierre-Auguste Renoir
65. “To get someone to pose, you have to be very good friends and above all speak the language.”
— 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. “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
69. “An artist must eat sparingly and give up a normal way of life.”
— Pierre-Auguste Renoir
70. “The advantage of growing old is that you become aware of your mistakes more quickly.”
— Pierre-Auguste Renoir
71. “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
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. “I’ve spent my life making blunders.”
— Pierre-Auguste Renoir
76. “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
77. “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
78. “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
79. “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
80. “I’ve known painters who never did any good work because instead of painting their models they seduced them.”
— Pierre-Auguste Renoir
81. “Do not think that it is possible to repeat another period.”
— Pierre-Auguste Renoir
82. “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
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
