"Impressionist" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... well-known pictures of celebrated artists. She had been compared to almost every type of all the great painters: Botticelli, Sir Peter Lely, Gainsborough, Burne-Jones. Some people said she was like a Sargent, others called her a post-impressionist type; there was no end to the old and new masters of whom she seemed to remind people; and she certainly had the rather insidious charm of somehow recalling the past while suggesting something undiscovered in the future. There was a good deal that was enigmatic about ...
— Tenterhooks • Ada Leverson
... and they both went 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
... about this precision which seems suitable to the American atmosphere; to the hard sunlight, and the cloudless skies, and the glittering detail of the architecture and the landscape; just as the vaguer English version is consonant to our mistier and more impressionist scenery. It is also connected perhaps with something more boyish about the younger civilisation; and corresponds to the passionate particularity with which a boy will distinguish the uniforms of regiments, the rigs of ships, ...
— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton
... epitome, seems to stand irresolute at a crossways with no signpost. It is hardly conscious of its own indecision, which it manages to conceal from itself by insisting that it is lyrical, whereas it is merely impressionist. The value of impressions depends upon the quality of the mind which receives and renders them, and to be lyrical demands at least as firm a temper of the mind, as definite and unfaltering a general ...
— Aspects of Literature • J. Middleton Murry
... 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 ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 25 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... there is not a number in the oratorio that does not show it with sufficient clearness. But fully to understand Handel and realise his greatness, it is not enough merely to know the spirit in which he worked: one must know also his method of depicting things and scenes. He was wholly an impressionist—in his youth from choice, as when he wrote the music of "Rinaldo" faster than the librettist could supply the words; in middle age and afterwards from necessity, as he never had time to write save when ...
— Old Scores and New Readings • John F. Runciman
... the Park Lane plutocrat. 'Neath his sheltered garden wall When the rain begins to fall, And the stormy winds do blow, You may see them in a row, Red effects and lake and yellow Getting nicely blurred and mellow. With the subtle gauzy mist Of the great Impressionist. Ask him how he chanced to find How to leave the French behind, And he answers quick and smart, "English climate's best ...
— Songs Of The Road • Arthur Conan Doyle
... surrender" has nothing to do with subservience to artistic convention. More than one revolt in modern art has been dominated by the desire to get out of the material just what it is really capable of. The impressionist wants light and color because paint can give him just these; "literature" in painting, the sentimental suggestion of a "story," is offensive to him because he does not want the virtue of his particular form to be dimmed by shadows from another ...
— Language - An Introduction to the Study of Speech • Edward Sapir
... was in the habit of describing himself as a pupil of Camille Pissarro. The belief is popular, and may be well founded; at any rate, it has emboldened Mr. Rutter to overstock his "Post-Impressionist and Futurist Exhibition" with unimportant works by this distinguished Impressionist. Surely a couple of examples would have sufficed to illustrate the latest, and best, theory of aesthetics. For that is the service performed on this occasion by the works ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... 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, ...
— His Masterpiece • Emile Zola
... don't you? On one side, looking landward, we had a Constable picture: a sky with tumbled clouds, shadowed downs, and forests cleft by a golden mosaic of meadows. Seaward, an impressionist sketch of Whistler's: Southampton Water and historic Portsmouth Harbour; stretches of glittering sand with the sea lying in ragged patches on it here and there like great pieces of broken glass. Over all, the English sunshine pale as an alloy of gold and silver; not too dazzling, yet discreetly ...
— Set in Silver • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... follows: I. 'Legend'; II. 'Love Song'; III. 'In War-time'; IV. 'Dirge'; V. Village Festival'"—a concession in which again one traces a hint of the inexplicable and amusing reluctance of the musical impressionist to acknowledge without reservation the programmatic basis of his work. In the case of the "Indian" suite, however, the intention is clear enough, even without the proffered titles; for the several movements are unmistakably based upon firmly held concepts of a definite dramatic and emotional ...
— Edward MacDowell • Lawrence Gilman
... rational balance, but when this is to be had in just its right force the plan of lines is excellent. In the matter of measures, were the whole composition pushed to the left we would at once feel a relief in the spaces. But the impressionist queries why not take it as it stands! So it might be taken, and a most balanced picture painted from it; but these considerations apply to the black and white, without the alteration which color ...
— Pictorial Composition and the Critical Judgment of Pictures • Henry Rankin Poore
... in the canyons had robbed them of their imaginary dangers, and—while we trust that we are not entirely without imagination—much of their weirdness and glamour with which they are inseparable to the idealist and the impressionist. Each of these upsets could have been avoided by a portage had we desired to make one, but success in other rapids made us a little reckless and ...
— Through the Grand Canyon from Wyoming to Mexico • E. L. Kolb
... bodyguard straggled up the hill, limp and sweating, behind a group of pennons, in the midst of which rode a horseman whose commanding presence and splendid war harness impressed me, though I could not make out his features; a wild, impressionist scene of black outlines, tossing headgear, and spears glittering and vanishing in front of the red glare in the sky, but nothing more. Even the dry throats of the suitors in the courtyard hardly mustered a husky cry of ...
— Gulliver of Mars • Edwin L. Arnold
... 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 ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, February 25, 1914 • Various
... execution of a picture out-of-doors was sometimes practised by Constable, more frequently by Turner, and some of the peculiarities of the French impressionist artists were shared by the English landscape painters of the early part of the century. While no one could dream of calling Constable an impressionist, it is interesting to recall the reception of his "Opening of Waterloo Bridge." Ridiculed in London, it was accepted ...
— Women in the fine arts, from the Seventh Century B.C. to the Twentieth Century A.D. • Clara Erskine Clement
... 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
... their pictures. And we should remember, and remember always, that while our modern art having won its technical and artistic skill within the past few hundred years, is now beginning to emancipate itself from the materialism of the eye by efforts towards the "impressionist" methods, these ancient peoples had long since arrived at the ability to convey "impressions" through the medium of harmonious compositions of the most rigid conventional elements—an artistic achievement which those ...
— Commentary Upon the Maya-Tzental Perez Codex - with a Concluding Note Upon the Linguistic Problem of the Maya Glyphs • William E. Gates
... across his chest, could have been seen chatting to the latest American Duchess; in another corner one of our largest Advertisers was exchanging epigrams with a titled Newspaper Proprietor. Famous Generals rubbed shoulders with Post-Impressionist Artists; Financiers whispered sweet nothings to Breeders of prize Poms; even an Actor-Manager might have been seen accepting an apology from a Royalty ...
— Once a Week • Alan Alexander Milne
... Like impressionist pictures, or Wagner's rugged music, the very absence of conventional form challenges attention. In Emily Dickinson's exacting hands, the especial, intrinsic fitness of a particular order of words might not be sacrificed to anything virtually extrinsic; and her verses all show ...
— Poems: Three Series, Complete • Emily Dickinson
... brilliance, graceless and aggressive, a glaring swagger. The drunken helot of cleverness is the creature who goes about making puns. A mere step above comes the epigram, the isolated epigram framed and glazed. Then such impressionist art as Crichton's pictures, mere puns in paint. What they mean is nothing, they arrest a quiet decent-minded man like myself with the same spasmodic disgust as a pun in literature—the subject is a transparent excuse; they are mere indecent and ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... la Dama Errante is not of the sort that lives very long; it is not a painting with aspirations towards the museum but an impressionist canvas; perhaps as a work it has too much asperity, is too ...
— Rosinante to the Road Again • John Dos Passos
... knows which to admire the more—the skill of the artist or the skill with which his studies have been reproduced, for the colours of the originals are shown with marvellous fidelity, and the delicate art of the impressionist loses nothing in the process. The book, therefore, is a double triumph, and will ...
— Rembrandt • Mortimer Menpes
... farmhouse on the inland shore of a large bay that was noted for its tides, and had wonderful possibilities of light and shade for an impressionist. Reeves was an enthusiastic artist. It mattered little to him that the boarding accommodations were most primitive, the people uncultured and dull, the place itself utterly isolated, as long as he could revel in ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1896 to 1901 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... 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
... Mr. van Buren and Freule Menela having theirs on one, and it gave 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
... 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 to ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Oct. 10, 1917 • Various
... pausing to open another door, touched an electric button which sent a circle of light about the walls of a long room hung with canvases of the French impressionist school. ...
— Short Stories for English Courses • Various (Rosa M. R. Mikels ed.)
... been too much talk about experience. What the critic, the impressionist, of the Brontes needs is to recover, before all things, the innocence of the eye. No doubt we all of us had it once, and can remember more or less what it was like. To those who have lost it I would say: Go back and read again Mrs. Gaskell's ...
— The Three Brontes • May Sinclair
... 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 lances ...
— Luca Signorelli • Maud Cruttwell |
