Joshua Reynolds Quotes

52 Sourced Quotes

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.

Joshua Reynolds
Few have been taught to any purpose who have not been their own teachers.

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.

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.

Joshua Reynolds
From a slight, undetermined drawing, where the ideas of the composition and character are just touched upon, the imagination supplies more than the painter himself, probably, could produce. And we accordingly often find that the finished work disappoints the expectation that was raised from the sketch...

Joshua Reynolds
The spectator, as he walks the gallery, will stop, or pass along. To give a general air of grandeur at first view, all trifling, or artful play of little lights, or an attention to a variety of tints is to be avoided; a quietness and simplicity must reign over the whole work, to which a breadth of uniform and simple color will very much contribute.

Joshua Reynolds
Nature is, and must be the fountain which alone is inexhaustible; and from which all excellencies must originally flow.

Joshua Reynolds
Could we teach taste or genius by rules, they would be no longer taste and genius.

Joshua Reynolds
It is to Titian we must turn our eyes to find excellence with regard to color, and light and shade, in the highest degree. He was both the first and the greatest master of this art. By a few strokes he knew how to mark the general image and character of whatever object he attempted...

Joshua Reynolds
Art in its perfection is not ostentatious; it lies hid, and works its effect, itself unseen.

Joshua Reynolds
Variety and intricacy is a beauty and excellence in every other of the arts which address the imagination; and why not in Architecture?

Joshua Reynolds
A passion for his art, and an eager desire to excel, will more than supply an artist with the place of method.

Joshua Reynolds
I should desire that the last words which I should pronounce in this Academy, and from this place, might be the name of—Michael Angelo.

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

Joshua Reynolds
Those who are not conversant in works of art are often surprised at the high value set by connoisseurs on drawings which appear careless, and in every respect unfinished; but they are truly valuable... they give the idea of a whole.

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
In portraits, the grace and, we may add, the likeness consists more in taking the general air than in observing the exact similitude of every feature.

Joshua Reynolds
Style in painting is the same as in writing; a power over materials, whether words or colors, by which conceptions or sentiments are conveyed.

Joshua Reynolds
I have heard painters acknowledge, though in that acknowledgment no degradation of themselves was intended, that they could do better without nature than with her; or as they express themselves, 'that it only put them out.

Joshua Reynolds
The distinct blue, red, and yellow colors... though they have not the kind of harmony which is produced by a variety of broken and transparent colors, have the effect of grandeur.

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.

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
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.

Joshua Reynolds
Whatever trips you make, you must still have nature in your eye...

Joshua Reynolds
The art of seeing Nature, or in other words, the art of using Models, is in reality the great object, the point to which all our studies are directed.

Joshua Reynolds