Quotes from Robert Henri

Houses, housetops, like human beings have wonderful character. The lives of housetops. The wear of the seasons. The country is beautiful, young, growing things. The majesty of trees. The backs of tenement houses are living documents.

The pictures which do not represent an intense interest cannot expect to create an intense interest.

The most vital things in the look of a landscape endure only for a moment. Work should be done from memory; memory of that vital moment.

All things change according to the state we are in. Nothing is fixed.

We must realize that artists are not in competition with each other. Help the young artists—find for them means to make their financial ways easier, that they may develop and fruit their fullest—but let us not ask them to please us in doing it.

Good composition is like a suspension bridge, each line adds strength and takes none away. Thus a work of art is finished from the beginning, as Whistler has said. If there are only ten lines, then they are the ten lines which comprehend the most. Composition is the freedom of a thing to be its greatest best by being in its right place in the organization. It is a just sense of the relation of things.

We read books. They make us think. It matters very little whether we agree with the books or not.

There is always a commanding and simple line around each head. Learn to have a love for the big simple line.

There are men who, at the bottom of the ladder, battle to rise; they study, struggle, keep their wits alive and eventually get up to a place where they are received as an equal among respectable intellectuals. Here they find warmth and comfort for their pride, and here the struggle ends, and a death of many years commences. They could have gone on living.

Concentrate on a single feature – as, build all toward one eye – make all lines lead toward that eye. (Robert Henri)

And so all great music, great prose, everything beautiful must depend upon the sure, free measure with which it is gardened and put into language for the people, for each lovely thing has its intrinsic value and belongs in its own position for the world to study, understand and thrive upon.

Lines are results, do not draw them for themselves. ... Lines give birth to lines. Drawing is not following a line on the model, it is drawing your sense of the thing. ... Make a drawing flow, stopping sometimes, and going on. ... Search for the simple constructive forces, line the lines of a suspension bridge. Get the few main lines and see what lines they call out. ... Have purpose in the places where lines stop.

We will be happy if we can get around to the idea that art is not an outside and extra thing; that it is a natural outcome of a state of being; that the state of being is the important thing; that a man can be a carpenter and be a great man.

There are moments in our lives, there are moments in a day, when we seem to see beyond the usual. Such are the moments of our greatest happiness. Such are the moments of our greatest wisdom. If one could but recall (t)his vision by some sort of sign. It was in this hope that the arts were invented. Sign-posts on the way to what may be. Sign-posts toward greater knowledge.

It beats all the things that wealth can give and everything else in the world to say the things one believes, to put them into form, to pass them on to anyone who may care to take them up.

Sometimes we do grip the concert in a human head, and so hold it that in a way we get a record of it into paint, but the vision and expressing of one day will not do for the next.

THE TECHNIQUE of a little individuality will be a little technique, however scrupulously elaborated it may be.

The brain can be a wonderful tool, can be a willing slave, as has been evidenced by some men, but of course it works poorly when it has not the habit of usage. An automobile can become a source of delight, but the first time you drive you are as apt to go up a tree as to go up the road.

The picture should only start the observer, should make him think he sees more than is on the canvas. To do this, the painter takes all the factors of the canvas and sets them in motion. He must create a rhythm of movement through all.

Every great artist is a man who has freed himself . . . Every man who has shown the world the way to beauty, to true culture, has been a rebel, a "universal" without patriotism, without home, who has found his people everywhere.

A public which likes to hear something worthwhile when you talk would like to understand something worthwhile when it sees pictures.

It is a curious fact that the delicate acoustic arrangements of a music hall can be impaired by the music of inefficient, discordant orchestras, and for this reason poor musical performances have been forbidden in some places. If a poor performance could affect adversely the acoustics of a hall, would not an able performance tend to improve them?

Each man must seek for himself the people who hold the essential beauty, and each man must eventually say to himself as I do, 'these are my people and all that I have I owe to them.

For an artist to be interesting to us he must have been interesting to himself. He must have been capable of intense feeling, and capable of profound contemplation. He who has contemplated has met with himself, is in a state to see into the realities beyond the surfaces of his subject. Nature reveals to him, and, seeing and feeling intensely, he paints, and whether he wills it or not each brush stroke is an exact record of such as he was at the exact moment the stroke was made.