John Constable Quotes About Painting

Quotes about: Painting

• Still I should paint my own places best; painting is with me but another word for feeling, and I associate "my careless boyhood" with all that lies on the banks of the Stour; those scenes made me a painter, and I am grateful; that is, I had often thought of pictures of them before ever I touched a pencil, and your picture ['The White Horse'] is one of the strongest instance I can recollect of it.

  John Constable

  Horse, Lying, Grateful

  Letter to Rev. John Fisher, October 23, 1821.

• Painting is a science, and should be pursued as an inquiry into the laws of nature. Why, then, may not landscape painting be considered as a branch of natural philosophy, of which pictures are but the experiments?

  John Constable

  Nature, Philosophy, Science

  John E. Thornes, John Constable (1999). “John Constable's Skies: A Fusion of Art and Science”, p.51, A&C Black

• Painting is with me but another word for feeling.

  John Constable

  Feelings, Emotion, Painting

  John E. Thornes, John Constable (1999). “John Constable's Skies: A Fusion of Art and Science”, p.51, A&C Black

• My picture [A Boat Passing a Lock, 1823-6] is liked at the [Royal] Academy, indeed it forms a decided feature and its light can not be put out. Because it is the light of nature - the Mother of all that is valuable in poetry - painting or anything else... my execution annoys most of them and all the scholastic ones - perhaps the scarifies I make for 'lightness' and 'brightness' is too much but these things are the essence of Landscape.

  John Constable

  Mother, Light, Essence

  "Constable". Book by Conal Shields, p. 288. Letter to Rev. John Fisher (1824), 1993.

• I am anxious that the world should be inclined to look to painters for information about painting.

  John Constable

  Looks, World, Information

  John Constable (2015). “Delphi Collected Works of John Constable (Illustrated)”, p.584, Delphi Classics

• I am glad you encouraged me with the 'Stoke' [his painting 'Stoke-by-Nayland', circa 1835] What say you to a summer morning? July or August, at eight or nine o'clock, after a slight shower during the night, to enhance the dews in the shadowed part of the picture, under 'Hedge row elms and hillocks green.' Then the plough, cart, horse, gate, cows, donkey, &c. are all good paintable material for the foreground, and the size of the canvas sufficient to try one's strength, and keep one at full collar.

  John Constable

  Summer, Morning, Horse

  "Constable". Book by Leslie Parris and Ian Fleming-Williams, Tate Gallery Publications, London, p. 380, Letter to William Purton (6 February 1836), 1993.

• I am anxious that the world should be inclined to look to painters for information about painting. I hope to show that ours is a regularly taught profession; that it is scientific as well as poetic; that imagination alone never did, and never can, produce works that are to stand by a comparison with realities.

  John Constable

  Reality, Imagination, Looks

  John Constable (2015). “Delphi Collected Works of John Constable (Illustrated)”, p.584, Delphi Classics

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