In portraits, the grace and, we may add, the likeness consists more in taking the general air than in observing the exact similitude of every feature. Joshua Reynolds More Quotes by Joshua Reynolds More Quotes From Joshua Reynolds 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 jealous real art 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-health pleasure art 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 exhibitions ambition people Certainly, nothing can be more simple than monotony. Joshua Reynolds monotony simplicity simple The greatest man is he who forms the taste of a nation; the next greatest is he who corrupts it. Joshua Reynolds greatness taste men 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 leaving teaching discovery 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 simplicity color two 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 artist may men 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 painter degradation heard 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 practice character memories Common observation and a plain understanding is the source of all art. Joshua Reynolds understanding common art 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 principles may littles 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 doe said may Less coin, less care. Joshua Reynolds coins care money 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 raises produce heart 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 resolve imitation mind 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 differences principles art Nothing is denied to well-directed labor. Joshua Reynolds denied wells labor 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 style passion moving The art of seeing nature, or, in other words, the art of using models, is in reality the great object, the point to which all our studies are directed. Joshua Reynolds study reality art
