"Impressionist" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... pictorial observation. 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, ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... 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; far-off trees in soft gray and violet, with a gleam ...
— The Chauffeur and the Chaperon • C. N. Williamson
... woman's club on every corner and not a drop of anything to drink outside of a drug-store. Why aren't you a millionnaire, Sam, with a gallery one hundred by fifty opening into your conservatory, and its centre panels filled with the works of that distinguished impressionist, John Somerset Waldo, R.A.?" ...
— The Underdog • F. Hopkinson Smith
... Leila Yorke than any novels had ever been before. Perhaps a sarcastic, rather cynical novel about human nature, of which Jane did not think much. Perhaps a serious novel, dealing with social or political conditions. Perhaps an impressionist novel, like Dorothy Richardson's. Only they were getting common; they were too easy. One could hardly help writing like that, unless one tried not to, if one had lately read any ...
— Potterism - A Tragi-Farcical Tract • Rose Macaulay
... prototype of Claude Lantier puts the case. "A bad book and a completely false one," he added, when speaking to the painter Emile Bernard on the disagreeable theme. Naturally Zola did not pose his old friend for the entire figure of the crazy impressionist, his hero, Claude. It was a study composed of Cezanne, Bazille, and one other, a poor, wretched lad who had been employed to clean Manet's studio, entertained artistic ambitions, but hanged himself. The conversations Cezanne had with Zola, his extreme ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... I 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 all our ...
— The Light That Failed • Rudyard Kipling
... violin piece for me once!" continued Mr. Hartmann, and brought out a folio containing letters the great impressionist had written him. They were a delightful revelation of the human side of Debussy's character, and Mr. Hartmann kindly consented to the quotation of one bearing on the Poeme for violin which Debussy had promised to write for him, and which, alas, owing to his illness and other reasons, ...
— Violin Mastery - Talks with Master Violinists and Teachers • Frederick H. Martens
... impressionist of divine moments, now the miser of all unimportant, trivial detail—is our tyrant, the muse of modern talk. Men talk now not what they feel or think, but what they remember, with their bad good memories. If they remembered the poets, or their ...
— Prose Fancies • Richard Le Gallienne
... quite extraordinary colorist; a colorist, I make bold to say, without imitator here or abroad—and with a most bold and effective touch, a touch like a battering ram; and a manner so peculiar and romantic, and extraneous, and ad libitum, and heart-searching, that— that—he—he is an impressionist, I presume?" ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... can do no good to anybody."[49] This sounds dangerously like dilettantism. It suggests the method of what in our day is called impressionism, one of the most delightful forms of literary entertainment when practiced by a master of literature. The impressionist's aim is to record whatever impinges on his brain, and though with a writer of fine discernment it is sure to be productive of exquisite results, as criticism it is undermined by the impressionist's assumption that every appreciation is ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... the sake of you; but you must also remember that the world would cease to worship you if your genius began to decline, while I should love you just the same if you took to painting sign-posts and illustrating Christmas cards—even if you became an impressionist." ...
— The Farringdons • Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler
... diet is the same, but how different his surroundings! If his bowl is placed on a table in the middle of the floor, he has but to flash his tail once and he has been all round the drawing-room. The drawing-room may not seem much to you, but to him this impressionist picture through the curved glass must be amazing. Let not the outdoor goldfish boast of his freedom. What does he, in his little world of water-lily roots, know of the vista upon vista which opens to his more happy brother as he passes jauntily from china dog to ottoman ...
— Not that it Matters • A. A. Milne
... spirit to the master-builder, Beethoven, was unsurpassed in the refinement of his musical sentiment. The melody flooding his soul beautified his piano compositions, to which only a delicate touch may do justice. His Impromptus and Moments Musical, small impressionist pieces, in which isolated musical ideas are clothed in brief artistic forms adapted to the timbre of the instrument, may well be thought to have placed piano literature ...
— For Every Music Lover - A Series of Practical Essays on Music • Aubertine Woodward Moore
... the Caravansery Theatre of Varieties announced the first performance of the uniquely interesting Suggestion Dances, interpreted by the Hon. Gorla Mustelford. An impressionist portrait of a rather severe-looking young woman gave the public some idea of what the danseuse might be like in appearance, and the further information was added that her performance was the greatest dramatic event of the season. Yet another piece of information ...
— When William Came • Saki
... has forgotten the names of all the others, and can only despise and abuse them in the lump. He triumphantly shows you his own work, which consists of just the kind of crude, half-clever, irresponsible, impressionist daubs you would expect from an amateur who talks in that way; and you wonder why on earth he should be in a lunatic asylum, of all places in the world. And (just as would happen outside, again) ...
— Peter Ibbetson • George du Marier et al
... details. When they found Browne asserting that 'Cato seemed to dote upon Cabbage,' or embroidering an entire paragraph upon the subject of 'Pyrrhus his Toe,' they could not help smiling; and surely they were quite right. Browne, like an impressionist painter, produced his pictures by means of a multitude of details which, if one looks at them in themselves, are discordant, and extraordinary, ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey
... 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 indiscriminately ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume I. No. VI. June, 1884 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... fleeting aspects; and in regard to the masterly handling of 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 ...
— An Art-Lovers guide to the Exposition • Shelden Cheney
... does stagger a feller that ain't got a connerseer's view, Fer trees by its teachin' is yeller, and cows is a shade of sky-blue. Hez says that ter paint 'em like natur' is common and tawdry and vile; He says it's a plaguey sight greater to do 'em "impressionist style." He done me my portrait, and, reely, my nose is a ultrymarine, My whiskers is purple and steely, and both of my cheeks is light green. When Mother first viewed it she fainted—she ain't up in Art, don't ...
— Cape Cod Ballads, and Other Verse • Joseph C. Lincoln
... depicting in misty shadows framed by luxurious accessories. They called him the Master of Chiffon, at Julien's; when he threw overboard his old friends and joined the new crowd, their indignation was great. His title now was the Ribbon Impressionist, and at the last salon of the Independents, Falcroft had the mortification of seeing a battalion of his former companions at anchor in front of his picture, The Lady with the Cat, which they reviled for at least an hour. He was an American who had lived his life long in France, and only showed ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... have been the accompaniment of concealment and fraud. This is exactly what we feel with Van Mieris and, though in a less degree, with Gerard Dow; whereas with Jean Van Eyck and Metsu, no matter how far they may have gone, we find them essentially as impressionist as Rembrandt ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler
... while the ladies of the Court were engaged, under the Queen's supervision, in knitting little woollen garments of shattering hues for the unsuspecting Gnomes, the Princess Royal produced her note-book and read aloud extracts which gave an impressionist bird's-eye view of English Literature from the fourteenth to the close of ...
— In Brief Authority • F. Anstey
... all sorts of fakers—conscious or otherwise. There is the futurist, post-impressionist poseur who more than half believes in his own pose. Possibly two small incidents may indicate what the ...
— Greenwich Village • Anna Alice Chapin
... a few impressionist paintings and some gallant French engravings of the eighteenth century: for Hassler pretended to some knowledge of all the arts, and Manet and Watteau were joined together in his taste in accordance ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... his impressionist way of painting flowers in colour patches, though he has now taken to the minute and mystical method of ...
— Dutch Life in Town and Country • P. M. Hough
... speechless for the moment. The reverse of the scrap of cross-ruled paper held a very fair likeness of a face which Virginia's mirror had oftenest portrayed: a sketch setting forth in a few vigorous strokes of the pencil the impressionist's ideal of the "goddess fresh ...
— A Fool For Love • Francis Lynde
... which are too brilliant can often be made soft and effective by twisting them together with a paler tint. Minute particles of colour brought together in this way are brilliant without crudeness. It is, in fact, the very principle upon which impressionist painters work, giving pure colour instead of mixed, but in such minute and broken bits that the eye confounds them with surrounding colour, getting at the same time the double ...
— How to make rugs • Candace Wheeler
... 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 ...
— The Harmsworth Magazine, v. 1, 1898-1899, No. 2 • Various
... culture out taking the Kneipp cure. So, if Stonehenge is a large, but only roughly geometric construction, the inattention to details by its builders—signifies anything you please—ambitious dwarfs or giants—if giants, that they were little more than cave men, or that they were post-impressionist architects ...
— The Book of the Damned • Charles Fort
... had never yet spoken to Mrs. Arbuthnot, who belonged to one of the various church sets, and who analysed, classified, divided and registered the poor; whereas she and Mellersh, when they did go out, went to the parties of impressionist painters, of whom in Hampstead there were many. Mellersh had a sister who had married one of them and lived up on the Heath, and because of this alliance Mrs. Wilkins was drawn into a circle which was highly ...
— The Enchanted April • Elizabeth von Arnim
... to follow. Frankly, I confess that Mr. MIDDLETON MURRY'S book has me baffled. Others perhaps may admire the pains lavished by the author in analysing the emotions of a group of characters whose temperaments certainly give him every opportunity for this exercise. An impressionist, and impressionable, youth, whom I have (reluctantly) to call hero, intrigues his unpleasant way through the plot; first in Paris—where you may make a shrewd guess at his pre-occupations—then in an English village, to which he has eloped with the wife of a friend; in France ...
— Punch, or The London Charivari, Vol. 152, February 21st, 1917 • Various
... loyal friend," Angela said, admiring the fire in his eyes and the glow on his face as she would have admired an impressionist sketch for a portrait by Sargent. "Only this man ought to be a fresco," she told herself as she followed out the picture-simile. "He's too big and spirited and unconventional to be put ...
— The Port of Adventure • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... men like Reuben toil that he may grow fat, nominally owning their vessels, actually in heavy bondage to their shrewd exacting masters. There are dark and deep waters of passion swirling in and out of these simple lives, and the author, whose method is broadly impressionist rather than meticulously realistic, contrives cleverly to suggest that what he imagines has in fact been closely observed. He can make and tell a story and he can marshal words with a certain magic. The tragedy ends peacefully with the resolution of the too bitter discord ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, February 25, 1914 • Various
... of mountain and gorge. To me this wayward diversity of spontaneous plant life bespeaks an unconfined, ungauged potentiality of resource; it unveils an ideographic prophecy, painted by Nature in her Impressionist mood, to be deciphered aright only by those willing to discern through the crudeness of dawn a promise of majestic day. Eucalypt, conifer, mimosa; tree, shrub, heath, in endless diversity and exuberance, yet sheltering little of animal life beyond half-specialised and belated types, ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... that reverence for the Renaissance has not crossed the Atlantic?" asked one of the "Albatross" party, who with his sketch book half open, was surreptitiously making an "impressionist" view of Leo's profile, as she stood listening to Alma's persiflage, and mechanically ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... mean. The owl is the wiseacre of Nature, the vulture is a vile harpy, and the eagle is the embodiment of everything great and mighty, and glorious and free, and swooping and catoptrical. There is very little to say against the eagle, except that he looks a deal the better a long way off, like an impressionist picture or a volcano. When the eagle is flying and swooping, or soaring and staring impudently at the sun, or reproaching an old feather of his own in the arrow that sticks in his chest, or mewing his mighty youth (a process ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 30, June 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... the Famous Art Dealers, Offer their Entire Stock of Horrifying Post-Impressionist and Futurist Pictures and Sculpture To Officers serving Abroad ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, September 9, 1914 • Various
... may be observed in the treatment of authors in Chapter X. and onwards, this treatment being not only somewhat less judicial and more "impressionist," but also more general and less buckrammed out with abstracts of particular works.[4] There appeared to me to be more than one reason for this, all such reasons being independent of, though by no means ignoring, the ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... face was hid by a mass of tumbling hair, that made me think of living grasses on a field in June. Thus her head was partially turned from me, and the moonlight, catching her outline, just revealed it against the wall like an impressionist picture. Strange hidden memories stirred in the depths of me, and for a moment I felt that I knew all about her. I stared about me quickly, nervously, trying to take in everything at once. Then the purring sound grew much louder and closer, and I forgot my notion that this woman ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery In Four Volumes - Mystic-Humorous Stories • Various
... pen to paper in the Paris scenes or the Barbizon scene; it was no good; he wrote and often rewrote all the rest; I had the best service from him on the character of Nares. You see, we had been just meeting the man, and his memory was full of the man's words and ways. And Lloyd is an impressionist, pure and simple. The great difficulty of collaboration is that you can't explain what you mean. I know what kind of effect I mean a character to give—what kind of tache he is to make; but how am I to tell my collaborator in words? Hence it was necessary to say, "Make him So-and-so"; and ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 25 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... a plane with the high-priced Riche, and ended its career early in the twentieth century; the Rocher de Cancale, memorable for its feasts and high-living patrons from all over Europe; the Cafe Guerbois, near the rue de St. Petersburg, where Manet, the impressionist, after many vicissitudes, won fame for his paintings and held court for many years; the Chat Noir, on the rue Victor Masse at Montmartre, a blend of cafe and concert hall, which has since been imitated widely, both in ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... the light and shade, the soul and body of a work.' This contention, for which Hazlitt fought all his life and fought brilliantly, is familiar to us by this time as the gage flung to didactic criticism by the 'impressionist', and in our day, in the generation just closed or closing, with a Walter Pater or a Jules Lemaitre for challenger, the betting has run on the impressionist. But in 1817 Hazlitt had all the odds against him when he stood up and accused the ...
— Characters of Shakespeare's Plays • William Hazlitt
... and Chue Jan are considered by the critics as having founded a special school in the great tradition of Wang Wei. Their paintings were quiet in coloring and were executed with broad strokes in an impressionist style. These works must be viewed from a distance to see their apparent violence merge into extreme elegance. They furnish a complete demonstration of the laws of atmospheric perspective, with its feeling of distance ...
— Chinese Painters - A Critical Study • Raphael Petrucci
... dare not touch the sublime naivete of poetry like that! Their impressionist, imagist, futurist theories make them too self-conscious. They say to themselves—"Is that word a 'cliche' word? Has that phrase been used several times before? Have I been carefully and precisely original in this? Is that image clear-cut enough? Have I reverted to the 'magic' of Verlaine and ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... for 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 ...
— Cobb's Bill-of-Fare • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
... artistic life the novel is full of interest. There is little doubt that the character of Claude Lantier was suggested by that of Edouard Manet, the founder of the French Impressionist school, with whom Zola was on terms of friendship. It is also certain that Pierre Sandoz, the journalist with an idea for a vast series of novels dealing with the life history of a family, was the ...
— A Zola Dictionary • J. G. Patterson
... of a scene. Skilful and faithful touches abound, but, as in the case of certain pre-Raphaelite pictures, extreme attention to detail causes him to miss the full scenic effect. He is not sufficiently the impressionist; he cannot suggest—a point in which he presents a strong contrast to Valerius Flaccus. And too many of his incidents, in spite of ingenious variation of detail, are but echoes of Vergil. The foot-race and the archery contest ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler
... 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
... Isopel Berners existed, but the account of her given by Borrow in Lavengro and The Romany Rye is in all probability coloured, just as her stature was heightened by him. If she were taller than he, she must have appeared a giantess. Borrow was an impressionist, and he has probably succeeded far better in giving a faithful picture of Isopel Berners than if he had been photographically accurate in ...
— The Life of George Borrow • Herbert Jenkins
... supply the portions she did not hear. Add to this the love of producing a sensation, which is an inherent trait of many characters, and behold potent reasons for seven-tenths of the cases of exaggeration which come to our notice, romances constructed upon the "impressionist-picture" plan—a thing of splash and glare and abnormal perspective that vitiates the taste for symmetry and ...
— The Secret of a Happy Home (1896) • Marion Harland
... difficulties of the entire quarter. When Villiers was her lover Villiers was middle-aged, and Ninon was a young woman; but when I knew her she was interested in the young generation, yet she kept friends with all her old lovers, never denying them her board. How funny was the impressionist's indignation against Villiers! He charged him with having squandered a great part of Ninon's fortune, but Villiers's answer to the young man was, "He talks like the concierge in my story of 'Les Demoiselles ...
— Memoirs of My Dead Life • George Moore
... disposition of our sensibility, with no other preoccupation; a quality, an attribute is spontaneously, arbitrarily selected because it impresses us at the given instant—in the final analysis, because it somehow pleases or displeases us. The images of this class have an "impressionist" mark. They are abstractions in the strict sense—i.e., extracts from and simplifications of the sensory data. They act less through a direct influence than by evoking, suggesting, whispering; they permit a glance, a passing glimpse: we may justly call them crepuscular ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot
... in Lord Birkenhead's Famous Trials is the Speech for the Prosecution. Mrs. Cecil Chesterton's chapter is an impressionist sketch of the court scene by a friend of the defendant. What was wanted was an impartial account, but I tried in vain to write it. The chronology of events, the connection between the Government Commission and the Libel ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward |
