Joshua Reynolds quotes
Joshua Reynolds was an English painter, renowned as one of the leading portrait artists of the 18th century. A founder and first president of the Royal Academy of Arts, he played a crucial role in elevating the status of painting in Britain. He left a lasting legacy through his influential portraits and writings on art. Here are 32 of his quotes:
Poetry operates by raising our curiosity, engaging the mind by degrees to take an interest in the event, keeping that event suspended, and surprising at last with an unexpected catastrophe. The painter's art is more confined, and has nothing that corresponds with, or perhaps is equivalent to, this power and advantage of leading the mind on, till attention is totally engaged. What is done by Painting, must be done at one blow; curiosity has received at once all the satisfaction it can ever have.
Joshua Reynolds
No Art can be grafted with success on another art. For though they all profess the same origin, and to proceed from the same stock, yet each has its own peculiar modes both of imitating nature, and of deviating from it, each for the accomplishment of its own particular purpose. These deviations, more especially, will not bear transplantation to another soil.
Joshua Reynolds
The greatest natural genius cannot subsist on its own stock: 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. When we know the subject designed by such men, it will never be difficult to guess what kind of work is to be produced.
Joshua Reynolds
Joshua Reynolds
Occupation: English Artist
Born: July 16, 1723
Died: February 23, 1792
Quotes count: 32
Wikipedia: Joshua Reynolds
Related authors
