Joshua Reynolds - Discourses on art

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

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

Joshua Reynolds
Words should be employed as the means, not as the end: language is the instrument, conviction is the work.

Joshua Reynolds
Poetry operates by raising our curiosity, engaging the mind by degrees to take an interest in the event, keeping that event suspended, and surprising at last with an unexpected catastrophe. The painter's art is more confined, and has nothing that corresponds with, or perhaps is equivalent to, this power and advantage of leading the mind on, till attention is totally engaged. What is done by Painting, must be done at one blow; curiosity has received at once all the satisfaction it can ever have.

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
What has pleased, and continues to please, is likely to please again: hence are derived the rules of art, and on this immoveable foundation they must ever stand.

Joshua Reynolds
If deceiving the eye were the only business of the art, there is no doubt, indeed, but the minute painter would be more apt to succeed; but it is not the eye, it is the mind, which the painter of genius desires to address; nor will he waste a moment upon those smaller objects, which only serve to catch the sense, to divide the attention, and to counteract his great design of speaking to the heart.

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

Joshua Reynolds
The mind is but a barren soil; a soil which is soon exhausted, and will produce no crop, or only one, unless it be continually fertilized and enriched with foreign matter.

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
It is the very same taste which relishes a demonstration in geometry, that is pleased with the resemblance of a picture to an original, and touched with the harmony of music.

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
It must be remembered that painting is not the mere gratification of sight.

Joshua Reynolds
As the natural dignity of the subject (of a portrait) is less, the more the ornamental helps are necessary to its embellishments.

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

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
A painter must compensate the natural deficiencies of his art. He has but one sentence to utter, but one moment to exhibit. He cannot, like the poet or historian, expatiate, and impress the mind.

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
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
The value and rank of every art is in proportion to the mental labour employed in it, or the mental pleasure produced by it.

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