Joshua Reynolds
Joshua Reynolds
Sir Joshua Reynolds RA FRS FRSAwas an influential eighteenth-century English painter, specialising in portraits. He promoted the "Grand Style" in painting which depended on idealization of the imperfect. He was a founder and first president of the Royal Academy of Arts, and was knighted by George III in 1769...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionPainter
Date of Birth16 July 1723
mind imitation resolve
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.
gathered images strictly
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.
american-inventor expedient man
There is no expedient to which a man will not go to avoid the labor of thinking.
views purpose different
Raphael and Titian seem to have looked at Nature for different purposes; they both had the power of extending their view to the whole; but one looked only for the general effect as produced by form, the other as produced by colour.
taken hands understanding
It is impossible that anything will be well understood or well done that is taken into a reluctant understanding, and executed with a servile hand.
imitation raised contrast
By close inspection... you will discover the manner of handling the artifices of contrast, glazing, and other expedients, by which good colorists have raised the value of their tints, and by which nature has been so happily imitated.
degradation painter heard
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.
distance light may
However minutely labored the picture may be in the detail, the whole will have a false and even an unfinished appearance, at whatever distance, or in whatever light it can be shown.
fashion sight knowing
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.
moving passion style
Martial music has sudden and strongly marked transitions from one note to another which that style of music requires; while in that which is intended to move the softer passions, the notes imperceptibly melt into one another.
nice eye attention
An eye critically nice can only be formed by observing well-colored pictures with attention.
deeds produce combination
Nothing can be made of nothing; he who has laid up no material can produce no combination.
learning mind matter
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.
poor shows eloquence
It is but a poor eloquence which only shows that the orator can talk.