91 Quotes by Joshua Reynolds

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 come of nothing.

The greatest man is he who forms the taste of a nation; the next greatest is he who corrupts it.

The value and rank of every art is in proportion to the mental labor employed in it, or the mental pleasure in producing it.

Words should be employed as the means, not the end; language is the instrument, conviction is the work.

Raphael and Titian seem to have looked at Nature for different purposes; they both had the power of extending their view to the whole; but one looked only for the general effect as produced by form, the other as produced by colour.

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.

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.

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.

The painter of genius will not waste a moment upon those smaller objects which only serve to catch the sense, to divide the attention, and to counteract his great design of speaking to the heart.