John Singer Sargent Quotes

#1. Mine is the horny hand of toil.

John Singer Sargent

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

John Singer Sargent

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

John Singer Sargent

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

John Singer Sargent

#5. Every time I paint a portrait I lose a friend.

John Singer Sargent

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

John Singer Sargent

#7. The thicker you paint, the more it flows.

John Singer Sargent

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

John Singer Sargent

#9. 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.

John Singer Sargent

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

John Singer Sargent

#11. I do not judge, I only chronicle.

John Singer Sargent

#12. 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.

John Singer Sargent

#13. 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.

John Singer Sargent

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

John Singer Sargent

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

John Singer Sargent

#16. 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.

John Singer Sargent

#17. Make the best of an emergency.

John Singer Sargent