Joshua Reynolds - Nature Quotes

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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
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
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.

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.

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

Joshua Reynolds
Every art, like our own, has in its composition fluctuating as well as fixed principles. It is an attentive inquiry into their difference that will enable us to determine how far we are influenced by custom and habit, and what is fixed in the nature of things.

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
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
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