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:

There is no expedient to which a man will not resort to avoid the real labor of thinking. (Joshua Reynolds)
Could we teach taste or genius by rules, they would be no longer taste and genius. View quote
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. View quote
Joshua Reynolds
What is a well-chosen collection of pictures, but walls hung round with thoughts? View quote
Joshua Reynolds
Words should be employed as the means, not as the end: language is the instrument, conviction is the work. View quote
Joshua Reynolds
The true test of all the arts, is not solely whether the production is a true copy of nature, but whether it answers the end of art, which is to produce a pleasing effect upon the mind. View quote
Joshua Reynolds
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. View quote
Joshua Reynolds
The mind is but a 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. View quote
Joshua Reynolds
What has pleased, and continues to please, is likely to please again: hence are derived the rules of art, and on this immoveable foundation they must ever stand. View quote
Joshua Reynolds
You are never to lose sight of nature; the instant you do, you are all abroad, at the mercy of every gust of fashion, without knowing or seeing the point to which you ought to steer. View quote
Joshua Reynolds
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. (Joshua Reynolds)
Genius is supposed to be a power of producing excellencies, which are out of the reach of the rules of art; a power which no precepts can teach, and which no industry can acquire. View quote
Joshua Reynolds
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. View quote
Joshua Reynolds
A mere copier of nature can never produce any thing great, can never raise and enlarge the conceptions, or warm the heart of the spectator. View quote
Joshua Reynolds
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. View quote
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. View quote
Joshua Reynolds
A room hung with pictures is a room hung with thoughts. View quote
Joshua Reynolds
A mere copier of nature can never produce anything great. View quote
Joshua Reynolds
If you have great talents, industry will improve them: if you have but moderate abilities, industry will supply their deficiency. View quote
Joshua Reynolds
It is but a poor eloquence which only shows that the orator can talk. View quote
Joshua Reynolds
If deceiving the eye were the only business of the art, there is no doubt, indeed, but 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; nor will he 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. (Joshua Reynolds)
It must be remembered that painting is not the mere gratification of sight. View quote
Joshua Reynolds
As the natural dignity of the subject(of a portrait)is less, the more the ornamental helps are necessary to its embellishments. View quote
Joshua Reynolds
Nature is, and must be the fountain which alone is inexhaustible; and from which all excellencies must originally flow. View quote
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. View quote
Joshua Reynolds