Sunlight is painting. [ Hawthorne ]
Thank God, I too am a painter ! [ Correggio ]
The mind paints before the brush. [ James Ellis ]
A picture is a poem without words. [ Horace ]
On painting and fighting look aloof. [ English Proverb, collected by George Herbert ]
Wit has as few true judges as painting. [ Wycherley ]
Painters and poets have liberty to lie. [ Burns ]
The rosy-fingered morn did there disclose
Her beauty, ruddy as a blushing bride,
Gilding the marigold, painting the rose,
With Indian chrysolites her cheeks were dyed. [ Baron ]
Teach the children! It is painting in fresco. [ Emerson ]
Sculpture is more than painting. It is greater
To raise the dead to life than to create
Phantoms that seem to live. [ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow ]
A room hung with pictures is a room hung with thoughts. [ Sir Joshua Reynolds ]
If we could but paint with the hand as we see with the eye! [ Balzac ]
Painting is silent poetry, and poetry is a speaking picture. [ Simonides ]
The love of gain never made a painter; but it has marred many. [ Washington Allston ]
A picture is an intermediate something between a thought and a thing. [ Coleridge ]
Music and painting both add a spirit to devotion, and elevate the ardor. [ Sterne ]
Sculpture and painting have an effect to teach us manners and abolish hurry. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]
If you keep painting the devil on the walls, he will by and by appear to you in person. [ French Proverb ]
Beauty, frail flower that every season fears, blooms in thy colors for a thousand years. [ Pope ]
Caracci's strength, Correggio's softer line, Paulo's free course, and Titian's warmth divine. [ Pope ]
Blest be the art that can immortalize, - the art that baffles time's tyrannic claim to quench it. [ Cowper ]
The art of painting does not proceed so much by intelligence as by sight and feeling and invention. [ Hamerton ]
There are three things that I have always loved and have never understood: Painting, Music, and Woman. [ Fontanelle ]
There are certain things in which mediocrity is not to be endured, such as poetry, music, painting, public speaking. [ La Bruyère ]
He that would be a master must draw from the life as well as copy from originals, and join theory and experience together. [ Jeremy Collier ]
There is hardly a person in the House of Commons worth painting, though many of them would be better for a little whitewashing. [ Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Grey ]
Since a true knowledge of nature gives us pleasure, a lively imitation of it in poetry or painting must produce a much greater. [ Dryden ]
A double task to paint the finest features of the mind, and to most subtle and mysterious things give color, strength, and motion. [ Akenside ]
Where painting is weakest, - namely, in the expression of the highest moral and spiritual ideas, - there music is sublimely strong. [ Mrs. Stowe ]
Ah! would that we could at once paint with the eyes! In the long way, from the eye, through the arm to the pencil, how much is lost! [ Lessing ]
There are pictures by Titian so steeped in golden splendors, that they look as if they would light up a dark room like a solar lamp. [ Hillard ]
Eloquence is the painting of thought; and thus, those who, after having painted it, still add to it, make a picture instead of a portrait. [ Pascal ]
Style in painting is the same as in writing, - a power over materials, whether words or colors, by which conceptions or sentiments are conveyed. [ Sir Joshua Reynolds ]
In portraits, the grace and, we may add, the likeness consists more in taking the general air than in observing the exact similitude of every feature. [ Sir Joshua Reynolds ]
What gems of painting or statuary are in the world of art, or what flowers are in the world of nature, are gems of thought to the cultivated and thinking. [ Oliver Wendell Holmes ]
In old times men used their powers of painting to show the objects of faith; in later times they used the objects of faith to show their powers of painting. [ John Ruskin ]
In old times men used their powers of painting to show the objects of faith; in later times they used the objects of faith that they might show their powers of painting. [ Ruskin ]
Art itself, in all its methods, is the child of religion. The highest and best works in architecture, sculpture and painting, poetry and music, have been born out of the religion of Nature. [ James Freeman Clarke ]
Fiction is of the essence of poetry as well as of painting; there is a resemblance in one of human bodies, things, and actions which are not real, and in the other of a true story by fiction. [ Dryden ]
The temple of art is built of words. Painting and sculpture and music are but the blazon of its windows, borrowing all their significance from the light, and suggestive only of the temple's use. [ J. G. Holland ]
The painter who is content with the praise of the world in respect to what does not satisfy himself is not an artist, but an artisan; for though his reward be only praise, his pay is that of a mechanic. [ Washington Allston ]
It is from Cadmus, the inventor of the alphabet, this ingenious art comes to us of painting words, speaking to the eyes, and by the different form of traced figures, giving color and body to the thoughts. [ De Brebeuf ]
The masters painted for joy, and knew not that virtue had gone out of them. They could not paint the like in cold blood. The masters of English lyric wrote their songs so. It was a fine efflorescence of fine powers. [ Emerson ]
The emperor one day took up a pencil which fell from the hand of Titian, who was then drawing his picture; and upon the compliment which Titian made him on that occasion he said, Titian deserves to be served by Caesar.
[ Dryden ]
The first merit of pictures is the effect which they can produce upon the mind; and the first step of a sensible man should be to receive involuntary effects from them. Pleasure and inspiration first, analysis afterward. [ Beecher ]
Stothard learned the art of combining colors by closely studying butterflies' wings; he would often say that no one knew what he owed to these tiny insects. A burnt stick and a barn-door served Wilkie in lieu of pencil and canvas. [ Samuel Smiles ]
The drama embraces and applies all the beauties and decorations of poetry. The sister arts attend and adorn it. Painting, architecture, and music are her handmaids. The costliest lights of a people's intellect burn at her show. All ages welcome her. [ Willmott ]
Is there anything more beautiful than a beautiful, beautiful flamingo, flying across in front of a beautiful sunset? And he's carrying a very beautiful rose in his beak, and also he's carrying a very beautiful painting with his feet. And also, you're drunk. [ Jack Handey, Deep Thoughts ]
The little may contrast with the great, in painting, but cannot be said to be contrary to it. Oppositions of colors contrast; but there are also colors contrary to each other, that is, which produce an ill effect because they shock the eye when brought very near it. [ Voltaire ]
What a conception of art must those theorists have who exclude portraits from the proper province of the fine arts! It is exactly as if we denied that to be poetry in which the poet celebrates the woman he really loves. Portraiture is the basis and the touchstone of historic painting. [ Schlegel ]
Art is a jealous mistress, and, if a man have a genius for painting, poetry, music, architecture, or philosophy, he makes a bad husband, and an ill provider, and should be wise in season, and not fetter himself with duties which will imbitter his days, and spoil him for his proper work. [ Emerson ]
The first degree of proficiency is, in painting, what grammar is in literature, - a general preparation for whatever species of the art the student may afterwards choose for his more particular application. The power of drawing, modelling, and using colors is very properly called the language of the art. [ Sir Joshua Reynolds ]
Remember always in painting, as in eloquence, the greater your strength the quieter will be your manner and the fewer your words; and in painting, as in all the arts and acts of life, the secret of high success will be found, not in a fretful and various excellence, but in a quiet singleness of justly chosen aim. [ Ruskin ]
In some exquisite critical hints on Eurythmy.
Goethe remarks, that the best composition in pictures is that which, observing the most delicate laws of harmony, so arranges the objects that they by their position tell their own story.
And the rule thus applied to composition in painting applies no less to composition in literature. [ Edward Bulwer-Lytton ]
Neither can we admit that definition of genius that some would propose - a power to accomplish all that we undertake;
for we might multiply examples to prove that this definition of genius contains more than the thing defined. Cicero failed in poetry. Pope in painting. Addison in oratory; yet it would be harsh to deny genius to these men. [ Colton ]
Those critics who, in modern times, have the most thoughtfully analyzed the laws of aesthetic beauty concur in maintaining that the real truthfulness of all works of imagination - sculpture, painting, written fiction - is so purely in the imagination, that the artist never seeks to represent the positive truth, but the idealized image of a truth. [ Edward Bulwer-Lytton ]
What caricature is in painting, burlesque is in writing; and in the same manner the comic writer and painter correlate to each other; as in the former, the painter seems to have the advantage, so it is in the latter infinitely on the side of the writer. For the monstrous is much easier to paint than describe, and the ridiculous to describe than paint. [ Fielding ]
Since I have known God in a saving manner, painting, poetry, and music have had charms unknown to me before. I have received what I suppose is a taste for them, or religion has refined my mind and made it susceptible of impressions from the sublime and beautiful. O, how religion secures the heightened enjoyment of those pleasures which keep so many from God, by their becoming a source of pride! [ Henry Martyn ]
How fitting to have every day, in a vase of water on your table, the wild flowers of the season which are just blossoming. Can any house be said to be furnished without them? Shall we be so forward to pluck the fruits of Nature and neglect her flowers? These are surely her finest influences. So may the season suggest the thoughts it is fitted to suggest. Let me know what pictures Nature is painting, what poetry she is writing, what ode composing now. [ Thoreau ]
I have very often lamented and hinted my sorrow, in several speculations, that the art of painting is made so little use of to the improvement of manners. When we consider that it places the action of the person represented in the most agreeable aspect imaginable, - that it does not only express the passion or concern as it sits upon him who is drawn, but has under those features the height of the painter's imagination, - what strong images of virtue and humanity might we not expect would be instilled into the mind from the labors of the pencil! [ Steele ]