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J. M. W. Turner Quotes
1775–1851 England
William Turner RA (baptized 14 May 1775 – 19 December 1851) was a British Romantic landscape painter, water-colourist, and printmaker. Turner was considered a controversial figure in his day, but is now regarded as the artist who elevated landscape painting to an eminence rivalling history painting.
Also known as: J M W Turner, Turner, J.M.W.
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10 quotes
Painting can never show her nose in company with architecture without being snubbed.
If I could find anything blacker than black, I'd use it.
He John Ruskin knows a great deal more about my pictures than I do; he puts things into my head, and points out meanings in them that I never intended.
I never in my whole life could make a drawing like that; I would at any time have given one of my little fingers to have made such a one [one of Girtin's yellow drawings].
My business is to paint what I see, not what I know is there.
Donald B. MacCulloch (1927)
To select, combine and concentrate that which is beautiful in nature and admirable in art is as much the business of the landscape painter in his line as in the other departments of art.
.. [I] reprobate the mechanically systematic approach of drawing.. ..so generally diffused. I think it can produce nothing but manner and sameness.
It is necessary to mark the greater from the lesser truth: namely the larger and more liberal idea of nature from the comparatively narrow and confined; namely that which addresses itself to the imagination from that which is solely addressed to the eye.
Eric Shanes (2012)
Then you will do away with the only social meetings [at the Art Academy in London ] we have, the only occasion on which we all come together in an easy, unrestrained manner. When we have no varnishing days, we shall not know one another.
No, Mr. Williams, certainly not; if Mr. Drake [a solicitor of the English Railway Company] has purchased a 'Turner', he ought to know it is a Turner; I was once silly enough to look at a picture that I was told had been painted by me, and I found myself soon after stuck up in a witness-box, giving evidence about it; I then said I'll never be so silly again.
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