Great Throughts Treasury

This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.

Joshua Reynolds, fully Sir Joshua Reynolds

English Portrait Painter and Writer

"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... Assiduity... will produce effects similar to those which some call the result of natural powers."

"There is no expedient to which man will not resort to void the real labor of thinking."

"Excellence is never granted to man, but as the reward of labor. It argues, indeed, no small strength of mind to persevere in the habits of industry, without the pleasure of perceiving those advantages which, like the hands of a clock, whilst they make hourly approaches to their point, yet proceed so slowly as to escape observation."

"A room hung with pictures is a room hung with thoughts."

"Taste depends upon those finer emotions which make the organization of the soul."

"The mind is but 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."

"We never are satisfied with our opinions, whatever we may pretend, till they are ratified and confirmed by the suffrages of the rest of mankind. We dispute and wrangle forever; we endeavor to get men to come to us, when we do not go to them."

"If you have great talents, industry will improve them: if you have but moderate abilities, industry will supply their deficiency. Nothing is denied to well-directed labor: nothing is to be obtained without it."

"A man who thinks he is guarding himself against prejudices by resisting the authority of others, leaves open every avenue to singularity, vanity, self-conceit, obstinacy, and many other vices, all tending to warp the judgment and prevent the natural operation of his faculties. We are not, indeed, satisfied with our own opinions, whatever we may pretend, till they are satisfied and confirmed by suffrage of the rest of mankind. We dispute and wrangle forever; we endeavor to get men to come to us when we do not go to them."

"A mere copier of nature can never produce anything great."

"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."

"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, and impress the mind..."

"An artist who brings to his work a mind tolerably furnished with the general principles of art, and a taste formed upon the works of good artists – in short, who knows in what excellence consists – will, with the assistance of models... be an overmatch for the greatest painter that ever lived who should be debarred such advantages."

"An eye critically nice can only be formed by observing well-colored pictures with attention."

"A passion for his art, and an eager desire to excel, will more than supply an artist with the place of method."

"All the gestures of children are graceful; the reign of distortion and unnatural attitudes commences with the introduction of the dancing master."

"Art in its perfection is not ostentatious; it lies hid and works its effect, itself unseen."

"By close inspection... you will discover the manner of handling the artifices of contrast, glazing, and other expedients, by which good colorists have raised the value of their tints, and by which nature has been so happily imitated."

"By leaving a student to himself he may... be led to undertake matters above his strength, but the trial will at least have this advantage: it will discover to himself his own deficiencies and this discovery alone is a very considerable acquisition."

"But young men have not only this frivolous ambition of being thought masters of execution, inciting them on the one hand, but also their natural sloth tempting them on the other. They are terrified at the prospect before them, of the toil required to attain exactness. The impetuosity of youth is disgusted at the slow approaches of a regular siege, and desires, from mere impatience of labour, to take the citadel by storm. They wish to find some shorter path to excellence, and hope to obtain the reward of eminence by other means, than those which the indispensable rules of art have prescribed."

"Claude Lorrain, on the contrary, was convinced that taking nature as he found it seldom produced beauties: his pictures are a composition of the various draughts which he has previously made from various beautiful scenes and prospects."

"Certainly, nothing can be more simple than monotony."

"Every art, like our own, has in its composition fluctuating as well as fixed principles. It is an attentive inquiry into their difference that will enable us to determine how far we are influenced by custom and habit, and what is fixed in the nature of things."

"Common observation and a plain understanding is the source of all art."

"From a slight, undetermined drawing, where the ideas of the composition and character are just touched upon, the imagination supplies more than the painter himself, probably, could produce. And we accordingly often find that the finished work disappoints the expectation that was raised from the sketch..."

"Could we teach taste or genius by rules, they would be no longer taste and genius."

"Few have been taught to any purpose who have not been their own teachers."

"Gardening, as far as Gardening is Art, or entitled to that appellation, is a deviation from nature; for if the true taste consists, as many hold, in banishing every appearance of Art, or any traces of the footsteps of man, it would then be no longer a Garden."

"Genius is supposed to be a power of producing excellences which are out of the reach of the rules of art: a power which no precepts can teach, and which no industry can acquire."

"He who resolves never to ransack any mind but his own, will be soon reduced, from mere barrenness, to the poorest of all imitations; he will be obliged to imitate himself, and to repeat what he has before often repeated."

"Grandeur of effect is produced by two different ways which seem entirely opposed to each other. One is by reducing the colors to little more than chiaroscuro... and the other, by making the colors very distinct and forcible... but still, the presiding principle of both those manners is simplicity."

"I do not see in what manner practice alone can be sufficient for the production of correct, excellent, and finished pictures. Works deserving this character never were produced, nor ever will arise, from memory alone..."

"I have heard painters acknowledge, though in that acknowledgment no degradation of themselves was intended, that they could do better without nature than with her; or as they express themselves, 'that it only put them out.'"

"I can recommend nothing better... than that you endeavor to infuse into your works what you learn from the contemplation of the works of others."

"However minutely labored the picture may be in the detail, the whole will have a false and even an unfinished appearance, at whatever distance, or in whatever light it can be shown."

"If a portrait-painter is desirous to raise and improve his subject, he has no other means than by approaching it to a general idea; he leaves out all the minute breaks and peculiarities in the face, and changes the dress from a temporary fashion to one more permanent, which has annexed to it no ideas of meanness from its being familiar to us."

"If it [refinement] does not lead directly to purity of manners, [it] obviates at least their greatest depravation."

"If we compare the quietness and chastity of the Bolognese pencil to the bustle and tumult that fills every part of a Venetian picture, without the least attempt to interest the passions, their boasted art will appear a mere struggle without effect."

"I wish you to be persuaded that success in your art depends almost entirely on your own industry; but the industry which I principally recommend is not the industry of the hands, but of the mind."

"If deceiving the eye were the only business of the art... the minute painter would be more apt to succeed. But it is not the eye, it is the mind which the painter of genius desires to address."

"If we put these great artists on a line of comparison with each other, Raphael had more taste and fancy, Michael Angelo more genius and imagination. The one excelled in beauty, the other in energy. Michael Angelo had more of the poetical inspiration; his ideas are vast and sublime; his people are a superior order of beings; there is nothing about them, nothing in the air of their actions or their attitudes, or the style and cast of their limbs or features, that reminds us of their belonging to our own species."

"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."

"In the practice of art... it is necessary to keep a watchful and jealous eye over ourselves; idleness, assuming the specious disguise of industry... may be employed to evade and shuffle off real labor - the real labor of thinking."

"It is but a poor eloquence which only shows that the orator can talk"

"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 be made of nothing; he who has laid up no materials can produce no combinations."

"It is by being conversant with the inventions of others that we learn to invent, as by reading the thoughts of others we learn to think."

"It is impossible that anything will be well understood or well done that is taken into a reluctant understanding, and executed with a servile hand."

"It is not uncommon to meet artists who, from a long neglect of cultivating the necessary intimacy with nature, do not even know her when they see her – she appearing a stranger to them, from their being so long habituated to their own representation of her."

"It is to Titian we must turn our eyes to find excellence with regard to color, and light and shade, in the highest degree. He was both the first and the greatest master of this art. By a few strokes he knew how to mark the general image and character of whatever object he attempted..."

"It is vain for painters... to endeavor to invent without materials on which the mind may work."