John Singer Sargent Quotes

• You can't do sketches enough. Sketch everything and keep your curiosity fresh.

  John Singer Sargent

  Drawing, Curiosity, Sketching

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• Cultivate an ever continuous power of observation. Wherever you are, be always ready to make slight notes of postures, groups and incidents. Store up in the mind... a continuous stream of observations from which to make selections later. Above all things get abroad, see the sunlight and everything that is to be seen.

  John Singer Sargent

  Mind, Groups, Sunlight

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• Color is an inborn gift, but appreciation of value is merely training of the eye, which everyone ought to be able to acquire.

  John Singer Sargent

  Appreciation, Eye, Color

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• A portrait is a painting with something wrong with the mouth.

  John Singer Sargent

  Portraits, Portraiture, Mouths

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• An artist painting a picture should have at his side a man with a club to hit him over the head when the picture is finished.

  John Singer Sargent

  Artist, Men, Should Have

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• Every time I paint a portrait I lose a friend.

  John Singer Sargent

  Funny, Art, Truth

  Quoted in Evan Esar, A Dictionary of Humorous Quotations (1949)

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• I do not judge, I only chronicle.

  John Singer Sargent

  Judging, Chronicles, Do Not Judge

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• I don't dig beneath the surface for things that don't appear before my own eyes.

  John Singer Sargent

  Eye, Beneath The Surface, Surface

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• If you begin with the middle-tone and work up from it toward the darks so that you deal last with your highest lights and darkest darks, you avoid false accents.

  John Singer Sargent

  Light, Lasts, Tone

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• A portrait is a picture in which there is just a tiny little something not quite right about the mouth.

  John Singer Sargent

  Portraits, Mouths, Littles

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• I hate to paint portraits! I hope never to paint another portrait in my life. Portraiture may be all right for a man in his youth, but after forty I believe that manual dexterity deserts one, and, besides, the color-sense is less acute. Youth can better stand the exactions of a personal kind that are inseparable from portraiture. I have had enough of it.

  John Singer Sargent

  Hate, Believe, Men

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• The thicker you paint, the more it flows.

  John Singer Sargent

  Flow, Paint

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• Cultivate an ever-continuous power of observation. Wherever you are, be always ready to make slight notes of postures, groups and incidents.

  John Singer Sargent

  Groups, Posture, Incidents

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• Make the best of an emergency.

  John Singer Sargent

  Emergencies

  Trevor J. Fairbrother, John Singer Sargent (2000). “John Singer Sargent: The Sensualist”, p.219, Yale University Press

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• No small dabs of colour - you want plenty of paint to paint with.

  John Singer Sargent

  Dabs, Want, Paint

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• It is certain that at certain times talent entirely overcomes thought or poetry.

  John Singer Sargent

  Overcoming, Talent, Certain

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• A person with normal eyesight would have nothing to know in the way of 'Impressionism' unless he were in a blinding light or in the dusk or dark.

  John Singer Sargent

  Dark, Light, Way

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• Impressionism' was the name given to a certain form of observation when Monet, not content with using his eyes to see what things were or what they looked like as everybody had done before him, turned his attention to noting what took place on his own retina (as an oculist would test his own vision).

  John Singer Sargent

  Eye, Names, Vision

  "John Sargent". Book by K.C. Charteris, p. 123, 1927.

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• Mine is the horny hand of toil.

  John Singer Sargent

  Hands, Horny, Toil

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• The habit of breaking up one's colour to make it brilliant dates from further back than Impressionism - Couture advocates it in a little book called 'Causeries d'Atelier' written about 1860 - it is part of the technique of Impressionism but used for quite a different reason.

  John Singer Sargent

  Book, Technique, Different

  "John Sargent". Book by K.C. Charteris, p. 1231927, 1927.

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