62 Quotes by James Whistler

The vast majority of English folk cannot and will not consider a picture as a picture, apart from any story which it may be supposed to tell.

You should not say it is not good. You should say you do not like it; and then, you know, you're perfectly safe.

You shouldn't say it is not good. You should say, you do not like it; and then, you know, you're perfectly safe.

It takes a long time for a man to look like his portrait.

Can't a person be born where they want to be born?

As light fades and the shadows deepen, all petty and exacting details vanish, everything trivial disappears, and I see things as they are in great strong masses: the buttons are lost, but the sitter remains; the sitter is lost, but the shadow remains; the shadow is lost, but the picture remains. And that, night cannot efface from the painter's imagination.

A picture is finished when all trace of the means used to bring about the end has disappeared.

Art should be independent of all clap-trap - should stand alone, and appeal to the artistic sense of eye or ear, without confounding this with emotions entirely foreign to it, as devotion, pity, love, patriotism and the like. All these have no kind of concern with it; and that is why I insist on calling my works 'arrangements' and 'harmonies.

Frederic Leighton to James McNeill Whistler: 'My dear Whistler, you leave your pictures in such a sketchy, unfinished state. Why don't you ever finish them?' James McNeill Whistler to Frederic Leighton: 'My dear Leighton, why do you ever begin yours?