John Singer Sargent Quotes

Color is an inborn gift, but appreciation of value is merely training of the eye, which everyone ought to be able to acquire.

Cultivate an ever continuous power of observation. Wherever you are, be always ready to make slight notes of postures, groups and incidents. Store up in the mind... a continuous stream of observations from which to make selections later. Above all things get abroad, see the sunlight and everything that is to be seen.

An artist painting a picture should have at his side a man with a club to hit him over the head when the picture is finished.

You can't do sketches enough. Sketch everything and keep your curiosity fresh.

A portrait is a painting with something wrong with the mouth.

Every time I paint a portrait I lose a friend.

I do not judge, I only chronicle.

I don't dig beneath the surface for things that don't appear before my own eyes.

If you begin with the middle-tone and work up from it toward the darks so that you deal last with your highest lights and darkest darks, you avoid false accents.

A portrait is a picture in which there is just a tiny little something not quite right about the mouth.

The thicker you paint, the more it flows.

I hate to paint portraits! I hope never to paint another portrait in my life. Portraiture may be all right for a man in his youth, but after forty I believe that manual dexterity deserts one, and, besides, the color-sense is less acute. Youth can better stand the exactions of a personal kind that are inseparable from portraiture. I have had enough of it.

Cultivate an ever-continuous power of observation. Wherever you are, be always ready to make slight notes of postures, groups and incidents.

Make the best of an emergency.

No small dabs of colour - you want plenty of paint to paint with.

It is certain that at certain times talent entirely overcomes thought or poetry.

A person with normal eyesight would have nothing to know in the way of 'Impressionism' unless he were in a blinding light or in the dusk or dark.

Mine is the horny hand of toil.

Impressionism' was the name given to a certain form of observation when Monet, not content with using his eyes to see what things were or what they looked like as everybody had done before him, turned his attention to noting what took place on his own retina (as an oculist would test his own vision).

The habit of breaking up one's colour to make it brilliant dates from further back than Impressionism - Couture advocates it in a little book called 'Causeries d'Atelier' written about 1860 - it is part of the technique of Impressionism but used for quite a different reason.