We look at a painting to know the painter; it’s his company we are after, not his skill.
Oscar Wilde: “I wish I had said that.” Whistler: “You will, Oscar; you will.
Mauve is just pink trying to be purple.
If silicon had been a gas I should have been a major-general.
Art happens-no hovel is safe from it, no prince may depend upon it, the vastest intelligence cannot bring it about.
An artist’s career always begins tomorrow.
Listen! There was never an artistic period. There was never an art-loving nation.
Work alone will efface the footsteps of work.
The world is divided into two classes – invalids and nurses.
The vast majority of English folk cannot and will not consider a picture as a picture, apart from any story which it may be supposed to tell.
The rare few, who, early in life have rid themselves of the friendship of the many.
A picture is finished when all trace of the means used to bring about the end has disappeared.
Nature is usually wrong.
The explanation is quite simple. I wished to be near my mother.
I am not arguing with you – I am telling you.
The work of a master reeks not of the sweat of the brow – suggests no effort – and is finished from its beginning.
Industry in art is a necessity – not a virtue – and any evidence of the same, in the production, is a blemish, not a quality; a proof, not of achievement, but of absolutely insufficient work, for work alone will efface the footsteps of work.
I remember that at one time I always made a drawing before going to bed!! – Of myself I mean – though I finally destroyed most of them.
Art is limited to the infinite, and beginning there cannot progress.
To say of a picture, as is often said in its praise, that it shows great and earnest labour, is to say that it is incomplete and unfit for view.
Nature is very rarely right, to such an extent even, that it might almost be said that nature is usually wrong...