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Joshua Reynolds Quotes
1723–1792 England
Sir Joshua Reynolds, RA, FRS, FRSA (July 16 1723 – February 23 1792) was an English artist, a founder member of the Literary Club, and the first President of the Royal Academy.
Also known as: Sir Joshua Reynolds
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22 quotes
Nature is, and must be the fountain which alone is inexhaustible; and from which all excellencies must originally flow.
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.
God does not give excellence to men but as the reward of labor.
Nothing is denied to well-directed labor; nothing is ever to be attained without it.
Words should be employed as the means, not as the end: language is the instrument, conviction is the work.
Could we teach taste or genius by rules, they would be no longer taste and genius.
As the natural dignity of the subject(of a portrait)is less, the more the ornamental helps are necessary to its embellishments.
There is no expedient to which a man will not resort to avoid the real labor of thinking.
What is a well-chosen collection of pictures, but walls hung round with thoughts?
The Examiner (1825)
You must have no dependence on your own genius. If you have great talents, industry will improve them; if you have but moderate abilities, industry will supply their deficiency.
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.
The mind is but a barren soil; a soil which is soon exhausted, and will produce no crop, or only one, unless it be continually fertilized and enriched with foreign matter.
Invention, strictly speaking, is little more than a new combination of those images which have been previously gathered and deposited in the memory: nothing can come of nothing.
It must be remembered that painting is not the mere gratification of sight.
What has pleased, and continues to please, is likely to please again: hence are derived the rules of art, and on this immoveable foundation they must ever stand.
You are never to lose sight of nature; the instant you do, you are all abroad, at the mercy of every gust of fashion, without knowing or seeing the point to which you ought to steer.
The true test of all the arts, is not solely whether the production is a true copy of nature, but whether it answers the end of art, which is to produce a pleasing effect upon the mind.
Genius is supposed to be a power of producing excellencies, which are out of the reach of the rules of art; a power which no precepts can teach, and which no industry can acquire.
A painter must compensate the natural deficiencies of his art. He has but one sentence to utter, but one moment to exhibit. He cannot, like the poet or historian, expatiate.
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.
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