Comments & Greek artists, Greek painters: Quotes on art and painting...

Comments & Greek painting, Greek artists

Yannis Stavrou, Evening in Thessaloniki, oil on paper

Poets, writers, painters, all kind of artists as well as scholars, philosophers, intellectuals write about art and painting in their poems, essays, novels. The art of painting opens a dialogue with the art of writing...

If we could but paint with the hand as we see with the eye!
- Honore de Balzac

Painters and poets have liberty to lie.
- Robert Burns

From the mingled strength of shade and light
A new creation rises to my sight,
Such heav'nly figures from his pencil flow,
So warm with light his blended colors glow.
. . . . The glowing portraits, fresh from life, that bring
Home to our hearts the truth from which they spring.
- Lord Byron (George Gordon Noel Byron),
Monody on the Death of the Rt. Hon. R.B. Sheridan
(st. 3)

If they could forget for a moment the correggiosity of Correggio and the learned babble of the sale-room and varnishing Auctioneer.
- Thomas Carlyle, Frederick the Great
(bk. IV, ch. III)

A picture is an intermediate something between a thought and a thing.
- Samuel Taylor Coleridge

A picture is a poem without words.
- Confucius, Anet. ad Her. (4, 28)

Thank God, I too am a painter!
- Antonio Allegri da Correggio

Blest be the art that can immortalize,--the art that baffles time's tyrannic claim to quench it.
- William Cowper

Paint me as I am. If you leave out the scars and wrinkles, I will not pay you a shilling.
- Oliver Cromwell,
Remark to the Painter, Lely

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."
- John Dryden

Style in painting is the same as in writing,--a power over materials, whether words or colors.
- James Ellis

The mind paints before the brush.
- James Ellis

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.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Pictures must not be too picturesque.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays--Of Art

The art of painting does not proceed so much by intelligence as by sight and feeling and invention.
- Philip Gilbert Hamerton

One picture in ten thousand, perhaps, ought to live in the applause of mankind, from generation to generation until the colors fade and blacken out of sight or the canvas rot entirely away.
- Nathaniel Hawthorne, Marble Faun
(bk. II, ch. XII)

He that seeks popularity in art closes the door on his own genius: as he must needs paint for other minds, and not for his own.
- Mrs. Anna Brownell Jameson,
Memoirs and Essays--Washington Allston

I only feel, but want the power to paint.
[Lat., Nequeo monstrare et sentio tantum.]
- Juvenal (Decimus Junius Juvenal), Satires
(VII, 56)

The only good copies are those which exhibit the defects of bad originals.
- Francois Duc de la Rochefoucauld, Maxims
(no. 136)

Ah, would 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!
- Ephraim Gotthold Lessing

The picture that approaches sculpture nearest
Is the best picture.
- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Michael Angelo
(pt. II, 4)

Whoever wishes to devote himself to painting should begin by cutting out his own tongue.
- Henri Matisse

I mix them with my brains, sir.
- John Opie ("The Cornish Wonder"),
answer when asked with what he mixed his colours

I paint a window just as I look out of a window. If a window looks wrong in a picture open, I draw the curtain and shut it, just as I would in my own room. One must act in painting as in life, directly.
- Pablo R. Picasso

Beauty, frail flower that every season fears, blooms in thy colors for a thousand years.
- Alexander Pope

Caracci's strength, Correggio's softer line, Paulo's free course, and Titian's warmth divine.
- Alexander Pope

He best can paint them who shall feel them most.
- Alexander Pope, Eloisa to Abelard
(last line)

The fellow mixes blood with his colors.
- Guido Reni (Guido Reni of Rubens),
said of Rubens

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

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

If it is the love of that which your work represents--if, being a landscape painter, it is love of hills and trees that moves you--if, being a figure painter, it is love of human beauty, and human soul that moves you--if, being a flower or animal painter, it is love, and wonder, and delight in petal and in limb that move you, then the Spirit is upon you, and the earth is yours, and the fullness thereof.
- John Ruskin, The Two Paths (lect. I)

Painting with all its technicalities, difficulties, and peculiar ends, is nothing but a noble and expressive language, invaluable as the vehicle of thought, but by itself nothing.
- John Ruskin, True and Beautiful--Painting
(introduction)

Every time I paint a portrait I lose a friend.
- John Singer Sargent,
in Bentley and Esar's "Treasury of Humorous Quotations" (1951)

With hue like that when some great painter dips
His pencil in the gloom of earthquake and eclipse.
- Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Revolt of Islam
(canto V, st. 23)

Painting is silent poetry, poetry is eloquent painting.
- Simonides of Ceos

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

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!
- Sir Richard Steele

There is no such thing as a dumb poet or a handless painter. The essence of an artist is that he should be articulate.
- Algernon Charles Swinburne,
Essays and Studies--Matthew Arnold's New Poems

The painter should not paint what he sees, but what will be seen.
- Paul Valery