"Impressionist" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... understanding. By the intuitive he does not mean the uncritical nor by the supersensuous the supernatural in the old and discredited sense of an arbitrary and miraculous revelation. Mysticism is not superstition, nor are the insights of the poet the whimsies of the mere impressionist. But he insists that the humanist, in his ordinary definition of experience, ignores or denies these superrational values. In opposition to him he rests his faith on that definition of experience which underlies Aristotle's statement that "the intellect is dependent ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... works of art might as well be turned out by machinery; without manual skill, genius could have no means of expression. As a matter of fact, in our own time, it is the presence of genius, without manual skill, or foolishly despising it, that has produced a sort of school called the impressionist. ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 2 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... the art sense of an inartistic people. They laugh at our conventional Chinese art, but the extreme of conventionality is certainly better than some of the daubs I have seen in American homes. Americans have peculiar fancies in art. One is called Impressionist Art. As near as I can understand it, painters claim that while you are looking at an object you do not really see it all, you merely gain an impression; so they paint only the impression. In a museum of ...
— As A Chinaman Saw Us - Passages from his Letters to a Friend at Home • Anonymous
... me quite a sinking of the heart. I tried not to show that I was sad, but I'm afraid Mr. Starr guessed, for in the afternoon he gave me a water-color sketch he had made in the morning, on deck. He called it a "rough, impressionist thing," but it is really exquisite; the water pale lilac, with silver frills of foam, just as it looked in the light when he sat painting; fields of cloth-of-gold, starred with wild flowers in the foreground; ...
— The Chauffeur and the Chaperon • C. N. Williamson
... days M. Zola's most intimate friend—a companion of his boyhood and youth—was Paul Cezanne, a painter who developed talent as an impressionist; and the lives of Cezanne and Manet, as well as that of a certain rather dissolute engraver, who sat for the latter's famous picture Le Bon Bock, suggested to M. Zola the novel which he has called L'Oeuvre. Claude Lantier, the chief character in the book, ...
— His Masterpiece • Emile Zola
... a sentimental impressionist and I went below. Stateroom forty-seven was mine. We three had been separated in the shuffle, and I knew not who was to be my room-mate. Feeling very downhearted, I stretched myself on the upper berth, and yielded to a mood of penitential sadness. I heard the last gang-plank thrown off, ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... style. Of course, he was not as a worldly describer, who studies to produce phrases which present an image, or arranges glittering pictures—all such endeavours he knew nothing about. But by instinct, and thanks to his warm African temperament, he was a kind of impressionist and ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand
... system to which Fuller was always constant in later life, and which he developed grandly. He was, however, as far removed as possible from that cheap, shallow, and idealess school of French painters whose wrongful appropriation of the name "Impressionist" has prejudiced us against the principle that it involves. The inherent difference between them and Fuller lies in this—he exercised a choice, and thought the beautiful alone to be worthy of description, while they selected nothing, but painted ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume I. No. VI. June, 1884 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... you—action and attention to detail. With this man's paintings you could tell a horse from a steamboat at a glance. He was nothing of an impressionist; he never put smokestacks on the horse nor legs on the steamboat. And his work gave general satisfaction ...
— Cobb's Bill-of-Fare • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
... The Goncourts only tell you the things that Gautier leaves out; they find new, fantastic points of view, discover secrets in things, curiosities of beauty, often acute, distressing, in the aspects of quite ordinary places. They see things as an artist, an ultra-subtle artist of the impressionist kind, might see them; seeing them indeed always very consciously with a deliberate attempt upon them, in just that partial, selecting, creative way in which an artist looks at things for the purpose of painting a picture. In order to arrive at their effects, they shrink from no sacrifice, ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... art-impulse deals with aesthetic appearances rather than with realities as such. The artist has to do with the semblance of things; not with things as they "are in themselves" either physically or logically, but with things as they appear to him. The work of the impressionist painter or the imagist poet illustrates this conception. The conventions of the stage are likewise a case in point. Stage settings, conversations, actions, are all affected by the "optique du theatre" ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry
... light. No other group will be referred to so often in connection with the American galleries. On wall B is a typically joyous canvas by Gaston La Touche, who carries Impressionism into figure work. On walls C and D are other examples of the Impressionist School, by Pissarro and Renoir and the English Sisley. On wall C is a portrait by Eugene Carriere. On wall D is a panel by Puvis de Chavannes, who has influenced modern mural painting more than any other artist. This picture has the typical union ...
— An Art-Lovers guide to the Exposition • Shelden Cheney
... public wants into a fundamental principle, and acted upon it with the confidence of an Aristotle. He asserts freely and frankly that, in his private capacity, such and such a story pleases him, is good (privately he is an impressionist and holds opinions far more valid than his editorial judgment, since they are founded upon taste and not upon intuition merely); but that "the public will not like it," or "in our rivalry with seventy other magazines we cannot afford ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... the special quality of animated movement, and for the excellence of its composition and its effect of spacious movement. How much larger a tiny panel like this appears than some of the crowded altar-pieces of his later years! Dashed in with a few broad touches, as a modern impressionist might paint, the scene of the camp is most natural, with its groups of soldiers and marching troops with raised ...
— Luca Signorelli • Maud Cruttwell
... fault was not too little imagination, but too much. The task of keeping it within due bounds was not only a task which he hated, but possibly it was a task which was beyond his strength. There are impressionists in painting. He was an impressionist in literature. He was fond of large effects—effects which were dashed in by a single movement of the brush. To descend to details was, he thought, a descent indeed. He was conscious that there was a public which would read a volume which, from first to last, only dealt with the minutest particularity, ...
— The Harmsworth Magazine, v. 1, 1898-1899, No. 2 • Various
... affectations of Whistler was his apparent failure to recognize persons with whom he had been on the most friendly terms. An American artist once met the impressionist in Venice, where they spent several months together painting, and he was invited to call on Whistler if he should go to Paris. The painter remembered the invitation. The door of the Paris studio was opened by Whistler ...
— Whistler Stories • Don C. Seitz
... whatever-and there was only the color of bodices past counting, the shimmer of fabrics soft and firm, silky and sheer: red, mauve, pink, blue, lilac, purple, ecru, rose, yellow, cream, and white, all the colors that an impressionist finds in a sunlit landscape, with here and there the dead shadow of a frock coat. My Aunt Georgiana regarded them as though they had been so many daubs of ...
— The Troll Garden and Selected Stories • Willa Cather
... wish I could send you away before you get angry with me. But—but the girl that lives with me is red-haired, and an impressionist, and ...
— The Light That Failed • Rudyard Kipling
... "The word 'impressionist' has come to have a bad meaning in art. Visions of Whistler come before you when you hear it. Such visions are not of the best possible augury, ...
— The Gentle Art of Making Enemies • James McNeill Whistler
... alternation of 5 and 7 syllables is compulsory. The most attenuated form of all is the hokku (or haikai) which consists of only three lines, namely, 17 syllables. Necessarily the ideas embodied in such a narrow vehicle must be fragmentary. Thus it results that Japanese poems are, for the most part, impressionist; they suggest a great deal more than they actually express. Here is ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... and feeling, his habit of mind, his interest, and his store of memories. The idealist must base his work upon some kind of reality, or it is a monstrosity; he is obliged to refer to the external world for his symbols. The impressionist, who concerns himself with the play of light over surfaces in nature, is seeking for truth, and he cares to paint at all because that play of light, seemingly so momentary and so merely sensuous, has a value ...
— The Gate of Appreciation - Studies in the Relation of Art to Life • Carleton Noyes
... over-awe the spiritual dogma of man. Why should a man surrender his dignity to the solar system any more than to a whale? If mere size proves that man is not the image of God, then a whale may be the image of God; a somewhat formless image; what one might call an impressionist portrait. It is quite futile to argue that man is small compared to the cosmos; for man was always small compared to the nearest tree. But Herbert Spencer, in his headlong imperialism, would insist that we had in some way been conquered and annexed by the astronomical universe. He spoke ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton
... stepped outside and went into the seventh edition of his impressionist sketch, "Farmyard of a French Farm," with lots of BBB pencil for the manure heap. He was a young C.O. and new ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Oct. 10, 1917 • Various
... need least background."[34] Scenes may play an important part in a story by influencing the actors or by offering a contrast to the events; in such cases they must be made specific, but rather after the broad free manner of the impressionist. The employment of the contrast or harmony of man and nature is one of the oldest devices of story telling, but also one of the most artistic and effective. It is not an artificial device, though it ...
— Short Story Writing - A Practical Treatise on the Art of The Short Story • Charles Raymond Barrett
... illumination and flat painting. Dagnan-Bouveret (1852-) is one of these men, a good draughtsman, and a finished clean painter who by his recent use of high color finds himself occasionally looked upon as an impressionist. As a matter of fact he is one of the most conservative of the moderns—a man of feeling and imagination, and a fine technician. Fantin-Latour (1836-1904) is half romantic, half allegorical in subject, and in treatment oftentimes designedly ...
— A Text-Book of the History of Painting • John C. Van Dyke |
