Joshua Reynolds May Quotations

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.

A painter must not only be of necessity an imitator of the works of nature... but he must be as necessarily an imitator of the works of other painters. This appears more humiliating, but is equally true; and no man can be an artist, whatever he may suppose, upon any other terms.

One inconvenience... may attend bold and arduous attempts: frequent failure may discourage. This evil, however, is not more pernicious than the slow proficiency which is the natural consequence of too easy tasks.

It is vain for painters... to endeavour to invent without materials on which the mind may work.

Reform is a work of time; a national taste, however wrong it may be, cannot be totally changed at once.

Though colour may appear at first a part of painting merely mechanical, yet it still has its rules, and those grounded upon that presiding principle which regulates both the great and the little in the study of a painter.

And he who does not know himself does not know others, so it may be said with equal truth, that he who does not know others knows himself but very imperfectly.