A passion for his art, and an eager desire to excel, will more than supply an artist with the place of method. Joshua Reynolds More Quotes by Joshua Reynolds More Quotes From Joshua Reynolds Whatever trips you make, you must still have nature in your eye. Joshua Reynolds stillseyetravel In the practice of art... it is necessary to keep a watchful and jealous eye over ourselves; idleness, assuming the specious disguise of industry... may be employed to evade and shuffle off real labor - the real labor of thinking. Joshua Reynolds jealousrealart The value and rank of every art is in proportion to the mental labor employed in it, or the mental pleasure in producing it. Joshua Reynolds mental-healthpleasureart Our Exhibitions [The Royal Academy] have... a mischievous tendency, by seducing the Painter to an ambition of pleasing indiscriminately the mixed multitude of people who resort to them. Joshua Reynolds exhibitionsambitionpeople Certainly, nothing can be more simple than monotony. Joshua Reynolds monotonysimplicitysimple The greatest man is he who forms the taste of a nation; the next greatest is he who corrupts it. Joshua Reynolds greatnesstastemen By leaving a student to himself he may... be led to undertake matters above his strength, but the trial will at least have this advantage: it will discover to himself his own deficiencies and this discovery alone is a very considerable acquisition. Joshua Reynolds leavingteachingdiscovery Grandeur of effect is produced by two different ways which seem entirely opposed to each other. One is by reducing the colors to little more than chiaroscuro... and the other, by making the colors very distinct and forcible... but still, the presiding principle of both those manners is simplicity. Joshua Reynolds simplicitycolortwo A painter must not only be of necessity an imitator of the works of nature... but he must be as necessarily an imitator of the works of other painters. This appears more humiliating, but is equally true; and no man can be an artist, whatever he may suppose, upon any other terms. Joshua Reynolds artistmaymen I have heard painters acknowledge, though in that acknowledgment no degradation of themselves was intended, that they could do better without nature than with her; or as they express themselves, 'that it only put them out. Joshua Reynolds painterdegradationheard I do not see in what manner practice alone can be sufficient for the production of correct, excellent, and finished pictures. Works deserving this character never were produced, nor ever will arise, from memory alone. Joshua Reynolds practicecharactermemories Common observation and a plain understanding is the source of all art. Joshua Reynolds understandingcommonart Though colour may appear at first a part of painting merely mechanical, yet it still has its rules, and those grounded upon that presiding principle which regulates both the great and the little in the study of a painter. Joshua Reynolds principlesmaylittles And he who does not know himself does not know others, so it may be said with equal truth, that he who does not know others knows himself but very imperfectly. Joshua Reynolds doesaidmay Less coin, less care. Joshua Reynolds coinscaremoney A mere copier of nature can never produce any thing great, can never raise and enlarge the conceptions, or warm the heart of the spectator. Joshua Reynolds raisesproduceheart He who resolves never to ransack any mind but his own, will be soon reduced, from mere barrenness, to the poorest of all imitations; he will be obliged to imitate himself, and to repeat what he has before often repeated. Joshua Reynolds resolveimitationmind Every art, like our own, has in its composition fluctuating as well as fixed principles. It is an attentive inquiry into their difference that will enable us to determine how far we are influenced by custom and habit, and what is fixed in the nature of things. Joshua Reynolds differencesprinciplesart Nothing is denied to well-directed labor. Joshua Reynolds deniedwellslabor Martial music has sudden and strongly marked transitions from one note to another which that style of music requires; while in that which is intended to move the softer passions, the notes imperceptibly melt into one another. Joshua Reynolds stylepassionmoving
