Oscar Wilde Artist Quotations

every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter. The sitter is merely the accident, the occasion. It is not he who is revealed by the painter; it is rather the painter who, on the coloured canvas, reveals himself.

The critic has to educate the public; the artist has to educate the critic.

To reveal art and conceal the artist is art's aim

God and other artists are always a little obscure.....

When critics disagree the artist is in accord with himself.

The moment that an artist takes notice of what other people want, and tries to supply the demand, he ceases to be an artist.

People sometimes inquire what form of government is most suitable for an artist to live under. To this question there is only one answer. The form of government that is most suitable to the artist is no government at all.

An actor is part illusionist, part artist, part ham.

The past is of no importance. The present is of no importance. It is with the future that we have to deal. For the past is what man should not have been. The present is what man ought not to be. The future is what artists are.

They are always asking a writer why he does not write like somebody else, or a painter why he does not paint like somebody else, quite oblivious of the fact that if either of them did anything of the kind he would cease to be an artist.

I was dominated, soul, brain, and power by you. You became to me the visible incarnation of that unseen ideal whose memory haunts us artists like an exquisite dream.

Bad artists always admire each others work.

What the artist is always looking for is the mode of existence in which soul and body are one and indivisible: in which the outward is expressive of the inward: in which form reveals.

The only thing that the artist cannot see is the obvious. The only thing that the public can see is the obvious...

A true artist takes no notice whatever of the public. The public to him are non-existent.

You know we poor artists have to show ourselves in society from time to time, just to remind the public that we are not savages.

No artist is ever morbid. The artist can express everything.

The true artist is known by what he annexes, and he annexes everything.

The only artists I have ever known who are personally delightful are bad artists. Good artists exist simply in what they make, and consequently are perfectly uninteresting in what they are.

It is sometimes said that the tragedy of an artist's life is that he cannot realise his ideal. But the true tragedy that dogs the steps of most artists is that they realise their ideal too absolutely. For, when the ideal is realised, it is robbed of its wonder and its mystery, and becomes simply a new starting-point for an ideal that is other than itself.

Artists reproduce themselves or each other, with wearisome iteration. But criticism is always moving on, and the critic is always developing.

Only mediocrities progress. An artist revolves in a cycle of masterpieces, the first of which is no less perfect than the last.

For an artist to marry his model is as fatal as for a gourmet to marry his cook: the one gets no sittings, and the other gets no dinners.

It is only the unimaginative who ever invents. The true artist is known by the use he makes of what he annexes.

While one should always study the method of a great artist, one should never imitate his manner. The manner of an artist is essentially individual, the method of an artist is absolutely universal. The first personality, which no one should copy.

Bad artists always admire each other's work. They call it being large-minded and free from prejudice. But a truly great artist cannot conceive of life being shown, or beauty fashioned, under any conditions other than those he has selected.

No artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style.

The only people I would care to be with now are artists and people who have suffered: those who know what beauty is, and those who know what sorrow is: nobody else interests me.