Christian Nestell Bovee Art Quotations

The great artist is a slave to his ideals.

It is one of the arts of a great beauty to heighten the effect of her charms by affecting to be sweetly unconscious of them.

In art there are two principal schools between which each aspirant has to choose--one distinguished by its close adherence to nature, and the other by its strenuous efforts to get above it.

A peculiar work in any art must not be too hastily judged. New styles have to create new tastes.

Excellence in art is largely the result of attention to minutiae, and--prayer.

I once asked a distinguished artist what place he gave to labor in art. "Labor," he in effect said, "is the beginning, the middle, and the end of art." Turning then to another--"And you," I inquired, "what do you consider as the great force in art?" "Love," he replied. In their two answers I found but one truth.

The language of the heart--the language which "comes from the heart" and "goes to the heart"--is always simple, always graceful, and always full of power, but no art of rhetoric can teach it. It is at once the easiest and most difficult language--difficult, since it needs a heart to speak it; easy, because its periods though rounded and full of harmony, are still unstudied.