James Whistler Quotes

An artist is not paid for his labor but for his vision.

Hang on the walls of your mind the memory of your successes. Take counsel of your strength, not your weakness. Think of the good jobs you have done. Think of the times when you rose above your average level of performance and carried out an idea or a dream or a desire for which you had deeply longed. Hang these pictures on the walls of your mind and look at them as you travel the roadway of life.

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 the photographer. It is for the artist to do something beyond this.

Nature contains the elements, in colour and form, of all pictures, as the keyboard contains the notes of all music. But the artists is born to pick, and choose, and group with science, these elements, that the result may be beautiful - as the musician gathers his notes, and forms his chords, until he brings forth from chaos glorious harmony

As light fades and the shadows deepen, all petty and exacting details vanish, everything trivial disappears, and I see things as they are in great strong masses: the buttons are lost, but the sitter remains; the sitter is lost, but the shadow remains; the shadow is lost, but the picture remains. And that, night cannot efface from the painter's imagination.

As music is the poetry of sound, so is painting the poetry of sight and the subject-matter has nothing to do with harmony of sound or of color.

We look at a painting to know the painter; it's his company we are after, not his skill.

People will forgive anything but beauty and talent. So I am doubly unpardonable.

Mauve is just pink trying to be purple.

Art should be independent of all clap-trap - should stand alone, and appeal to the artistic sense of eye or ear, without confounding this with emotions entirely foreign to it, as devotion, pity, love, patriotism and the like. All these have no kind of concern with it; and that is why I insist on calling my works 'arrangements' and 'harmonies.

Paint should not be applied thick. It should be like a breath on the surface of a pane of glass.

Frederic Leighton to James McNeill Whistler: 'My dear Whistler, you leave your pictures in such a sketchy, unfinished state. Why don't you ever finish them?' James McNeill Whistler to Frederic Leighton: 'My dear Leighton, why do you ever begin yours?

For art and joy go together, with bold openness, and high head, and ready hand - fearing naught and dreading no exposure.

To say to the painter that Nature is to be taken as she is, is to say to the player that he may sit on the piano.

A picture is finished when all trace of the means used to bring about the end has disappeared.

A student of James McNeill Whistler tells the great artist, 'I tend to paint what I see.' Whistler replies, 'Ah! The shock will come when you see what you paint!

The world is divided into two classes - invalids and nurses.

If other people are going to talk, conversation becomes impossible.

The explanation is quite simple. I wished to be near my mother.

It takes a long time for a man to look like his portrait.

You shouldn't say it is not good. You should say, you do not like it; and then, you know, you're perfectly safe.

An artist's career always begins tomorrow

I am not arguing with you - I am telling you.

The work of a master reeks not of the sweat of the brow - suggests no effort - and is finished from its beginning.

The rare few, who, early in life have rid themselves of the friendship of the many.