Mauve is just pink trying to be purple..

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

It is for the artist... in portrait painting to put on canvas something more than the face the model wears for that one day; to paint the man, in sho….

I maintain that two and two would continue to make four, in spite of the whine of the amateur for three, or the cry of the critic for five..

Truly color is vice! Of course, it can be, and has the right to be one of the finest virtues. Controlled by the strong hand and careful guidance of h….

Art should be independent of all clap-trap - should stand alone, and appeal to the artistic sense of eye or ear, without confounding this with emotio….

Art is a goddess of dainty thought, reticent of habit, abjuring all obtrusiveness, purposing in no way to better others. She is, withal selfishly occ….

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

We look at a painting to know the painter; it's his company we are after, not his skill..

Nature contains the elements, in colour and form, of all pictures, as the keyboard contains the notes of all music. But the artists is born to pick, ….

Nature is very rarely right, to such an extent even, that it might almost be said that nature is usually wrong..

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

It takes a long time for a man to look like his portrait..

As music is the poetry of sound, so is painting the poetry of sight and the subject-matter has nothing to do with harmony of sound or of color..

As light fades and the shadows deepen, all petty and exacting details vanish, everything trivial disappears, and I see things as they are in great st….

People will forgive anything but beauty and talent. So I am doubly unpardonable..

The vast majority of English folk cannot and will not consider a picture as a picture, apart from any story which it may be supposed to tell..

Art happens-no hovel is safe from it, no prince may depend upon it, the vastest intelligence cannot bring it about..

Industry in art is a necessity - not a virtue - and any evidence of the same, in the production, is a blemish, not a quality; a proof, not of achieve….

To say to the painter that Nature is to be taken as she is, is to say to the player that he may sit on the piano..

If silicon had been a gas I should have been a major-general..