Edgar Degas Quotes
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Make portraits of people in familiar and typical positions, above all give their faces the same choice of expression one gives their bodies. Thus if laughter is typical for a person, make him laugh – there are, naturally, feelings that one cannot render…
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Oh! Women can never forgive me. They hate me, they can feel that I ‘m disarming them. I show them without their coquetry, in the states of animals cleaning themselves... ...I'm sure of it; they see me as the enemy. Fortunately, since if they did like me, that would be the end of me.
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Painting is easy when you don't know how, but very difficult when you do.
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I always urged my contemporaries to look for interest and inspiration to the development and study of drawing, but they would not listen. They thought the road to salvation lay by the way of colour.
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Je n'admets pas qu'une femme puisse dessiner comme ca.
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Only when he no longer knows what he is doing does the painter do good things.
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A picture is a thing which requires as much knavery, as much malice, and as much vice as the perpetration of a crime. Make it untrue and add an accent of truth.
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It requires courage to make a frontal attack on nature through the broad planes and the large lines and it is cowardly to do it by the facets and details. It is a battle.
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Even working from nature you have to compose.
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Art is not what you see, but what you make others see.
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In our beginnings, Fantin, Whistler and I were all on the same road, the road from Holland Dutch 17th century painters
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Anyone would think paintings were made like speculations on the stock market, out of the frictions of ambitious young people... ...it sharpens the mind, but clouds your judgement.
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There is a kind of success that is indistinguishable from panic.
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Your pictures would have been finished a long time ago if I were not forced every day to do something to earn money.
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I, marry? Oh, I could never bring myself to do it. I would have been in mortal misery all my life for fear my wife might say, 'That's a pretty little thing,' after I had finished a picture.
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Je voudrais être illustre et inconnu.
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He Corot is always the strongest, he has foreseen everything.
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Le dessin n'est pas la forme, il est la manière de voir la forme.
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Visitor: Monsieur Degas, were there any of Monet's pictures at the Durand-Ruel exhibition?Degas: Why, I met Monet himself there, and I said to him, 'Let me get out of here. Those reflections in the water hurt my eyes!' His pictures were always too draughty for me. If it had been any worse I should have had to turn up my coat collar.
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C'est très bien de copier ce qu'on voit, c'est beaucoup mieux de dessiner ce que l'on ne voit plus que dans son mémoire. C'est une transformation pendant laquelle l'ingéniosité collabore avec la mémoire. Vous ne reproduisez que ce qui vous a frappé, c'est-à-dire le nécessaire.
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Boredom soon overcomes me when I am contemplating nature.
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A painting requires a little mystery, some vagueness, and some fantasy. When you always make your meaning perfectly plain you end up boring people.
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À vous il faut la vie naturelle, à moi la vie factice.
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..women... ...their way of observing, combining, sensing the way they dress. They compare a thousand of more visible things with one another than a man does.