James Whistler Quotes

Nature is very rarely right, to such an extent even, that it might almost be said that nature is usually wrong ...

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

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

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.

I maintain that two and two would continue to make four, in spite of the whine of the amateur for three, or the cry of the critic for five.

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

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

I can't tell you if genius is hereditary, because heaven has granted me no offspring.

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

Art is limited to the infinite, and beginning there cannot progress.

Nature is usually wrong.

Mauve is just pink trying to be purple.

The masterpiece should appear as the flower to the painter - perfect in its bud as in its bloom - with no reason to explain its presence - no mission to fulfill - a joy to the artist, a delusion to the philanthropist - a puzzle to the botanist - an accident of sentiment and alliteration to the literary man.

Art happens-no hovel is safe from it, no prince may depend upon it, the vastest intelligence cannot bring it about.

Can't a person be born where they want to be born?

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?

Truly color is vice! Of course, it can be, and has the right to be one of the finest virtues. Controlled by the strong hand and careful guidance of her Master drawing, color is a splendid Mistress, with a mate worthy of herself, her lover, but her Master likewise, the most magnificent Mistress possible, and the result is evident in all the glorious things that spring from their union.

An artist's career always begins tomorrow.

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

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.

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

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.

Art is a goddess of dainty thought, reticent of habit, abjuring all obtrusiveness, purposing in no way to better others. She is, withal selfishly occupied with her own perfection only - having no desire to teach.

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

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

Listen! There was never an artistic period. There was never an art-loving nation.

If silicon had been a gas I should have been a major-general.

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