If the man who paints only the tree, or flower, or other surface he sees before him were an artist, the king of artists would be t...he photographer. It is for the artist to do something beyond this: in portrait painting to put on canvas something more than the face the model wears for that one day; to paint the man, in short, as well as his features.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
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 u...nfit for view.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Ruskin's counsel: The labour of two days ... is that for which you ask two hundred guineas? Whistler: No: I ask it for the kn...owledge of a lifetime.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Yet must I not give Nature all; thy art, My gentle Shakespeare, must enjoy a part.... For though the poet's matter Nature be, His art doth give the fashion; and, that he Who casts to write a living line, must sweat (Such as thine are) and strike the second heat Upon the Muses' anvil; turn the same (And himself with it) that he thinks to frame, Or, for the laurel, he may gain a scorn; For a good poet's made, as well as born.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Twentieth-century art may start with nothing, but it flourishes by virtue of its belief in itself, in the possibility of control o...ver what seems essentially uncontrollable, in the coherence of the inchoate, and in its ability to create its own values.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The knowledge of God is the cause of things. For the knowledge of God is to all creatures what the knowledge of the artificer is t...o things made by his art.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
To say the word Romanticism is to say modern art--that is, intimacy, spirituality, color, aspiration towards the infinite, express...ed by every means available to the arts.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »