Quotes from John Singer Sargent

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

Every time I paint a portrait I lose a friend.

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.

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

Mine is the horny hand of toil.

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.

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

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

I do not judge, I only chronicle.

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.

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.

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.

Every time I paint a portrait I lose a friend.

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

'Impressionism' was the name given to a certain form of observation when Monet, not content with using his eyes to see what things were or what they looked like as everybody had done before him, turned his attention to noting what took place on his own retina (as an oculist would test his own vision).