Joshua Reynolds Quotes About Painting

Quotes about: Painting

• Style in painting is the same as in writing; a power over materials, whether words or colors, by which conceptions or sentiments are conveyed.

  Joshua Reynolds

  Art, Writing, Color

  Joshua Reynolds (1842). “The discourses of Sir Joshua Reynolds: Illustr. by explanatory notes & plates by John Burnet”, p.28

• The first degree of proficiency is, in painting, what grammar is in literature, a general preparation for whatever the student may afterward choose for more particular application. The power of drawing, modeling, and using colors, is very properly called the language of the art.

  Joshua Reynolds

  Art, Color, Drawing

  Sir Joshua Reynolds (1853). “The Life and Discourses of Sir Joshua Reynolds”

• 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

  Sir Joshua Reynolds (1837). “Discourses on Painting and the Fine Arts, delivered at the Royal Academy. With a portrait”, p.52

• Poetry operates by raising our curiosity, engaging the mind by degrees to take an interest in the event, keeping that event suspended, and surprising at last with an unexpected catastrophe. The painter's art is more confined, and has nothing that corresponds with, or perhaps is equivalent to, this power and advantage of leading the mind on, till attention is totally engaged. What is done by Painting, must be done at one blow; curiosity has received at once all the satisfaction it can ever have.

  Joshua Reynolds

  Art, Blow, Curiosity

  Sir Joshua Reynolds (1842). “The Discourses of Sir Joshua Reynolds”, p.142

• 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

  Air, Grace, Portraits

  Sir Joshua Reynolds, Edmond Malone (1809). “The Works of Sir Joshua Reynolds”, p.83

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