Great Throughts Treasury

"I lived inside the pictures and from the inside of them looked out upon a world less real than they."

"The more materialistic science becomes, the more angels shall I paint. Their winds are my protest in favour of the immortality of the soul. "

"In the first place, we would inquire why it is that he overlooks usual anatomicalproportions and the acknowledged bases on which the human body is constructed? Again we would wish to know how it is he does not cast these draperies upon hisfigures with some express relation to theforms thejv clothe, and why he does not cast these draperies into folds and masses which by the well-ascertained laws ofgravity they are bound to assume?"

"I mean by a picture a beautiful romantic dream of something that never was, never will be – in a light better than any light that ever shone – in a land no one can define or remember, only desire – and the forms divinely beautiful."

"Portraiture may be a great art. There is a sense indeed in which it is perhaps the greates of any art. And portraiture involves expression. Quite true. But expression of what? Of a passion, an emotion, a mood? Certainly not… The only expression allowable in great portraiture is the expression of character and moral quality, not of anything temporary , fleeting, accidental."

"I have no politics, and no party, and no particular hope: only this is true, that beauty is very beautiful, and softens, and comforts, and inspires, and rouses, and lifts up, and never fails."