English Painter Quotes

Joshua Reynolds

John Constable

Thomas Gainsborough

Richard Hamilton (artist)

Stanley Spencer

Benjamin Haydon

James Northcote

Turner has outdone himself; he seems to paint with tinted steam, so evanescent and so airy.

We love a genius for what he leaves and mourn him for what he takes away

Thomas Gainsborough

An eye critically nice can only be formed by observing well-colored pictures with attention.

Joshua Reynolds

When I lived in Cookham I was disturbed by a feeling of everything being meaningless. But quite suddenly I became aware that everything was full of special meaning and this made everything holy... I observed this sacred quality in most unexpected quarters.

Stanley Spencer

If the artist is not to lose much of his ancient purpose he may have to plunder the popular arts to recover the imagery which is his rightful inheritance.

Richard Hamilton (artist)

If men would only take the chances of doing right because it is right, instead of the immediate certainty of the advantage of doing wrong, how much happier would their lives be.

Benjamin Haydon

How happy a thing were a wedding,
And a bedding,
If a man might purchase a wife
For a twelvemonth and a day

Fashion is gentility running away from vulgarity, and afraid of being overtaken by it.

James Northcote

It seems to me that art is a great miracle-it is the showing forth of the Holy Spirit transubstantiation. It is to find and proclaim the poetry of life, without which there is no life.

When you long with all your heart for someone to love you, a madness grows there that shakes all sense from the trees and the water and the earth. And nothing lives for you, except the long deep bitter want. And this is what everyone feels from birth to death.

My wife was born in Hemingford Grey in Huntingdon and we knew and loved its river, the Great Ouse. We sat by it, we meditated by it, we walked its banks, we explored it by canoe, skiff and pont. I knew its mills, its sluices, its locks, its churches, its meadows and, further afield, its fens. It became part of my life.

Whereas formerly, before the advent of machinery, the commonest article you could pick up had a life and warmth which gave it individual interest, now everything is turned out to such a perfection of deadness that one is driven to pick up and collect, in sheer desperation, the commonest rubbish still surviving from the earlier periods.

When Troy was built, you recollect I dabbled as an Architect; A very sorry one, you'll say, But worse since then have come in play, And of the art I've understood Enough, to do more harm than good...