James McNeill Whistler Quotes

37 Sourced Quotes

I am not arguing with you — I am telling you.

James McNeill Whistler
I say I can't thank you too much for the name 'Nocturne' as a title for my moonlights! You have no idea what an irritation it proves to the critics and consequent pleasure to me — besides it is really so charming and does so poetically say all that I want to say and no more than I wish.

James McNeill Whistler
One cannot continually disappoint a Continent.

James McNeill Whistler
Shall the painter then.... decide upon painting? Shall he be the critic and sole authority? Aggressive as is this supposition, I fear that, in the length of time, his assertion alone has established what even the gentleman of the quill accept as the canons of art, and recognize as the masterpieces of work. Seurat's painting of the Grande Jatte proved extremely influential.

James McNeill Whistler
On failing a chemistry test at the U.S. Military Academy:
Had silicon been a gas, I would have been a major-general by now.

James McNeill Whistler
A group from Glasgow sought in 1891 to purchase his portrait of Thomas Carlyle was shocked that Whistler's price was 1000 guineas. A spokesman countered that the portrait was not even life size. Whistler replied, 'But, you know, few men are life size.'

James McNeill Whistler
Listen! There was never an artistic period. There was never an art-loving nation.

James McNeill Whistler
Over and over again did the Attorney-General cry out aloud, in the agony of his cause, 'What is to become of painting if the critics withhold their lash?

James McNeill Whistler
May I therefore acknowledge the tender glow of health induced by reading, as I sat here in the morning sun, the flattering attention paid me by your gentleman of ready wreath and quick biography!

James McNeill Whistler
I remember that at one time I always made a drawing before going to bed!! - Of myself I mean - though I finally destroyed most of them.

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

James McNeill Whistler
Art is limited to the infinite, and beginning there cannot progress.

James McNeill Whistler
Paint should not be applied thick. It should be like a breath on the surface of a pane of glass.

James McNeill Whistler
To say of a picture, as is often said in its praise, that it shows great and earnest labor, is to say that it is incomplete and unfit for view.

James McNeill Whistler
Two and two the mathematician continues to make four, in spite of the whine of the amateur for three, or the cry of the critic for five.

James McNeill Whistler
If the man who paints only the tree, or flower, or other surface he sees before him were an artist, the king of artists would be the photographer. It is for the artist to do something beyond this: in portrait painting to put on canvas something more than the face the model wears for that one day: to paint the man, in short, as well as his features; in arrangement of colours to treat a flower as his key, not as his model. This is now understood indifferently well – at least by dressmakers. In every costume you see attention is paid to the key-note of colour which runs through the composition, as the chant of the Anabaptists through the 'Prophète', or the Hugenots' hymn in the opera of that name.

James McNeill Whistler
Yes, madam, Nature is creeping up.
Iin response to a lady who said that a landscape reminded her of his work

James McNeill Whistler