"Impressionistic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... was just what it ought to remind them of. It had life, gaiety, abandon. The critic who said that the orange domes provided just the right tone, and that this tone ought to have been followed throughout, didn't make sufficient allowance for public taste. He wanted the Exposition to be an impressionistic picture in one key. But one key was exactly what Guerin didn't want. His purpose was to catch the excitement in variety of color as well as the warmth, to stimulate the mind. He succeeded in adapting his color scheme to architecture that had breadth and dignity. At first he ...
— The City of Domes • John D. Barry
... way it was rendered in France. Only a short time before he had come away perfectly scandalized from a performance of an opera of Gluck's: the ingenious Parisians had taken it into their heads to deck the old fellow up, and cover him with ribbons, and pad out his rhythms, and bedizen his music with, impressionistic settings, and charming little dancing girls, forward and wanton.... Poor Gluck! There was nothing left of his eloquent and sublime feeling, his moral purity, his naked sorrow. Was it that the French could not understand these ...
— Jean Christophe: In Paris - The Market-Place, Antoinette, The House • Romain Rolland
... method 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 mechanical ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... the century Canale was followed by Guardi, who executed smaller views with more of an eye for the picturesque, and for what may be called instantaneous effects, thus anticipating both the Romantic and the Impressionist ...
— The Venetian Painters of the Renaissance - Third Edition • Bernhard Berenson
... that 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 ...
— The Life of George Borrow • Herbert Jenkins
... 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 art ...
— As A Chinaman Saw Us - Passages from his Letters to a Friend at Home • Anonymous
... 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
... 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; far-off ...
— The Chauffeur and the Chaperon • C. N. Williamson
... 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
... 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
... 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, ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey
... 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 Case, the connection ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... open, and the man received an impressionist picture of which the salient features were a mop of black hair, a scarlet jersey, and a pair ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler
... 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. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Oct. 10, 1917 • Various
... 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
... possession, rushed violently to and fro in mock drill performance, and finally taken to pieces, the parts being scattered promiscuously in all directions. Dawn revealed an appearance of havoc resembling a popular impressionist representation of a battle-field. Here a caisson with its boxes, severed from their belongings, stretched its long pole appealingly towards heaven; the wheels had been dispersed to distant quarters of the ground and lay on their sides; elsewhere were the guns, sometimes ...
— From Sail to Steam, Recollections of Naval Life • Captain A. T. Mahan
... 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 upon intuition ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... 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 impression ...
— How to make rugs • Candace Wheeler
... 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, ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... matter had that impartiality which comes from intellectual incoherence, she hadn't so much a judgment upon the whole as a warring mosaic of judgments. It was talking upon Post Impressionist lines, talking in the manner of Picasso. She had the firmest conviction that to strike against employment, however ill-paid or badly conditioned, was a disgraceful combination of folly, ingratitude and general wickedness, and she had ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... lurking in the plum tree's crevice of Browning's Garden Fancy, which creeps and crawls with beetle and spider, worm and eft.[33] Or it is night and moonlight by the sandy shore, and for a moment—before love enters—all the mind of the impressionist artist ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... I understand and respect your objection. You have made her famous already by your impressionist portrait of her, and I hear you are to do a more elaborate picture 'in the fall.' Now, Dal, you know you admire her immensely. She is lovely, she is charming, she hails from the land whose women, when they possess charm, unite with it a freshness and ...
— The Rosary • Florence L. Barclay
... a few etchings and many flowers; and Dolores herself came from behind her writing desk, smiling and blushing, to meet her tall visitor. The old soldier scanned her as he would have scanned a new recruit, and the result of his impressionist study was to his mind highly satisfactory. ...
— The Dictator • Justin McCarthy
... "You're somewhat of an impressionist," the curator said, as he examined Colin's two pictures carefully, "and you've succeeded in making your sketches look more submarine than I have. But I think ...
— The Boy With the U. S. Fisheries • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... the Chope de la Sorbonne, did not fail to tell her of Alec's call the day she left Paris for Barbizon. There was no mistaking Leontine's description, which was impressionist to a degree. It was evident, then, that he not only possessed her address, as shown by the letter, but knew of her absence. So she reasoned that if he did not hear from her within forty-eight hours he would assume that she was still away ...
— A Son of the Immortals • Louis Tracy
... Balzac: his objective personality at last resolves itself into a vividly personal interpretation. His breadth blinds one for a while, that is all. Hence Balzac may be called an incurable romantic, an impressionist, as much as realist. Like all first-class art, his gives us the seeming-true for our better instruction. He said in the Preface to "Pere Goriot" that the novelist should not only depict the world as it is, but ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... the day was slowly breaking, and the open country was flooded with pale, washed-out grays, like the background of an impressionist painting. A heavy dew had risen in the night, and as the boy passed through the dripping weeds on his way to the stable they left a chill moisture upon his bare feet. His eyes were heavy with sleep, and to his cloudy ...
— The Voice of the People • Ellen Glasgow
... 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: ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot
... it 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 yer see? And she had a notion 'twas ...
— Cape Cod Ballads, and Other Verse • Joseph C. Lincoln
... years of the nineteenth century was largely a modified and very delicate imitation. Breaking with conventions as to how things are supposed to be—conventions mainly based not on seeing but on knowing or imagining—the Impressionist insists on purging his vision from knowledge, and representing things not as they are but as they really look. He imitates Nature not as a whole, but as she presents herself to his eyes. It was a most needful ...
— Ancient Art and Ritual • Jane Ellen Harrison
... the public to his work caused him little disturbance. He pleased his own taste, allowing himself a good-natured contempt for the work which supplanted him, coupled with an ever-generous hand for any post-Impressionist ...
— A Great Success • Mrs Humphry Ward
... assertive grandeur 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 ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... got into the garden, but he had not been a very adroit reptile. He had shown his fangs; and the woman had promptly bruised his head and had given him an eye like an Impressionist sunset, which for several days he had to hide from ...
— Kimono • John Paris
... 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? ...
— Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 2 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Paris painters of the past, but of more recent times than those of the grand old Italians, spoke of Courbet, of Manet, of Renoir, Guilaumin, Sisley, the Barbizon school, Cezanne and his followers. Finally he came to the greatest of the French Impressionist painters, to Pissaro, for whom, as Miss Van Tuyn knew, he had an admiration which amounted almost to ...
— December Love • Robert Hichens
... both for 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
... 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
... such despair that we turned round to see if it was the shellac man in person. It was little Bean, the pitcher of the Corners team, all dressed up in his baseball togs, scarlet breeches and blue shirt, quite the bird of paradise, and reading a yellow telegram, and his face black as thunder. He was an impressionist study, wasn't he, Fergy? We asked what was up, or rather down, for elevation had no part in him. It appeared that a match was on for this afternoon, between the Baked Beans and the Sweet Peas, the Corners and the Spruce Point team. The Beans were all here except the pitcher and first-baseman, ...
— The Merryweathers • Laura E. Richards
... the highest examples of different types can be among godlike men—a cavalier of the South, of southern blood and southern life, who carries in thought and in deed all the serious purpose and disinterested action that characterized the Pilgrim Fathers whom we commemorate. He comes from an impressionist State where the grass is blue [laughter], where the men are either all white or all black, and where, we are told, quite often the settlements are painted red. [Laughter.] He is a soldier, a statesman, a scholar, and, above all, a lover; and among all the world which ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various
... 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 prototype of ...
— A Zola Dictionary • J. G. Patterson
... 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 ...
— The Secret of a Happy Home (1896) • Marion Harland
... 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 ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery In Four Volumes - Mystic-Humorous Stories • Various
... various 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 ...
— Tenterhooks • Ada Leverson
... historical, classic, grand: but the smaller pictures—the lively little bits of colour dotted in here and there—were of that new school which Mr. Smithson affected. They were of that school which is called Impressionist, in which ballet dancers and jockeys, burlesque actresses, masked balls, and all the humours of the side scenes are represented with the sublime audacity of an art which disdains finish, and relies on chic, fougue, chien, flou, v'lan, the inspiration of the moment. Lesbia ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... the impressionist school," he said sadly; "on the contrary, the business of the artist is to paint what he knows to be there," and he gazed complacently at his own canvas, which had the appearance of a spirited drawing of a fortified place, or of the contents of a child's Noah's ark, so stiff, so solid, so ...
— Colonel Quaritch, V.C. - A Tale of Country Life • H. Rider Haggard
... though the good bishop seems to me to have been rather too severe. But the pictures of Woodstock Palace and Park have that indescribable and vivid charm which Scott, without using any of the 'realist' minuteness or 'impressionist' contortions of later days, has the faculty of communicating to such things. For myself, I can say—and I am sure I may speak for hundreds—that Tullyveolan, Ellangowan, the Bewcastle moor where Bertram ...
— Sir Walter Scott - Famous Scots Series • George Saintsbury
... volume of guide-book details, highly colored impressionist sketches, and dainty miniature painting combined would not do justice to Moscow. Therefore, I shall confine myself to a few random reminiscences which may serve to illustrate habits or traits in the character of ...
— Russian Rambles • Isabel F. Hapgood
... the study of the best art of various schools that the galleries of Europe display", Mr. Richmond mistakes Degas for an impressionist (I use the word in its accepted sense); he follows the lead of the ordinary art critic who includes Degas among the impressionists because Degas paints dancing lessons, and because he has once or twice ...
— Modern Painting • George Moore
... 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 ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... never been any chance of her belonging to him. Max had something like a sensation of guilt because he could not call up a picture of her, traced with the sharp clarity of an etching. In thinking of Billie, he had merely an impressionist portrait: golden hair, wonderful lashes, and a sudden upward look from large, dark eyes, set in a face of pearly whiteness. Because Sanda DeLisle was somewhat of the same type, having yellow-brown hair, and a small, fair face, her image would push itself in front of that other far ...
— A Soldier of the Legion • C. N. Williamson
... said that Cezanne 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 ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... want of "finish," but if finish means the last word of expressiveness of touch, "The Hall with the Four Children," as we may call it, may-stand as a permanent reference on this point. If the picture of the Spanish dancer illustrates, as it seems to me to do, the latent dangers of the Impressionist practice, so this finer performance shows what victories it may achieve. And in relation to the latter I must repeat what I said about the young lady with the flower, that this is the sort of work which, when produced in youth, leads the attentive spectator to ...
— Picture and Text - 1893 • Henry James |
