Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres Quotes

32 Sourced Quotes

If I were asked to put up a sign over my door, I should inscribe it: School for Drawing, and I am sure that I should bring forth painters.

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres
Let us strive to have eyes that see well, that see with sagacity: that is all I ask. If you want to see that leg as ugly, I know that there will be cause for you to do so, but I will tell you, "Take my eyes and you will see it as beautiful."

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres
Love the true because it is also the beautiful, if you are able to discern it and to feel it.

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres
Art is never at so high a degree of perfection as when it resembles nature so strongly that one might take it for nature herself. Art never succeeds better than when it is concealed.

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres
Woe to him who deals lightly with his art! Woe to the artist who does not retain seriousness of mind!

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres
All the faults that you commit come, not from any lack of taste and imagination on your part, but from your not having put in enough of nature.

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres
One always reaches beauty when one reaches truth.

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres
You tremble before nature: tremble, but do not doubt!

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres
Sculpture is an art that is severe, rigid: therefore it was consecrated by the ancients to religion.

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres
To draw does not mean simply to reproduce contours; drawing does not consist merely of line: drawing is also expression, the inner form, the plane, modeling. See what remains after that.

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres
When studying nature, have eyes only for the ensemble at first. Interrogate it and interrogate nothing but it. The details are self-important little things which have to be put in their place.

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres
One must reach the point of singing true with the pencil or with brush quite as much as with the voice; rightness of forms is like rightness of sounds.

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres
Everything in nature is harmony: a little too much, or else too little, disturbs the scale and makes a false note.

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres
Never spend a single day without tracing a line, said Apelles. By that he meant what I repeat to you: line is drawing, it is everything.

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres
The painter who trusts to his compass is leaning on a ghost.

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres
One must keep right on drawing; draw with your eyes when you cannot draw with a pencil. As long as you do not hold a balance between your seeing of things and your execution, you will do nothing that is really good.

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres
Make copies, young man, many copies. You can only become a good artist by copying the masters.
To Edgar Degas

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres
Drawing contains everything, except the hue.

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres
Nothing is made with nothing, and the way good inventions are made is to familiarize yourself with those of others.

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres
All I have is the small merit of knowing the road that one must follow in order to arrive.

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres
[Anti-classic art] is the doctrine of those who want to produce without having worked, who want to know without having learned; it is an art as lacking in faith as in discipline, wandering blindly because of its having no light in the darkness, and demanding that mere chance lead it through places where one can advance only by means of courage, experience, and reflection.

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres
To claim that we can get along without study of the antique and the classics is either madness or laziness. Yes, anti-classic art, if one may even call it an art, is nothing but an art of the lazy.

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres
The more sublime efforts of art have no effect at all upon uncultivated minds. Fine and delicate taste is the fruit of education and experience. All that we receive at birth is the faculty for creating such taste in ourselves and for cultivating it, just as we are born with a disposition for receiving the laws of society and for conforming to their usages. It is up to this point, and no further, that one may say that taste is natural to us.

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres
If we consult experience, we shall find that it is by making oneself familiar with the inventions of others that, in art, one learns oneself how to invent, as one accustoms oneself to think through reading the ideas of others.

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres
Address yourselves to the masters, therefore, speak to them, they will answer you, for they are still living. It is they who will instruct you ; I myself am no more than their quiz-master.

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres
Doubt itself is blameworthy when we are considering the marvels of the ancients.

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres
We must copy nature always and learn to see it well. It is for that purpose that we need to study the antique and the masters, not to imitate them; what we need, as I repeat, is to learn to see.

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres
Our task is not to invent but to continue, and we have enough to do if, following the examples of the masters, we utilize those innumerable types which nature constantly offers to us, if we interpret them with wholehearted sincerity and ennoble them through that pure and firm style without which no work has beauty.

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres
What do those so-called artists mean when they preach the discovery of the "new"? Is there anything new? Everything has been done, everything has been discovered.

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres
He who is not willing to ask the contribution of any mind other than his own will soon find himself reduced to the most miserable of all imitations, which is to say the imitation of his own works.

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres