Quotes About Art

A large picture can give us images of things, but a relatively small one can best re-create the instantaneous unity of nature as a view - the unity of which the eyes take in at a single glance.

I sometimes find it half a sin, To put to words the grief i feel, For words like nature,half reveal, and half conceal the soul within.

Nature meant me A wife, a silly, harmless, household dove, Fond without art, and kind without deceit.

Nature is a revelation of God; Art a revelation of man.

Genius learns from nature, its own nature. Talent learns from art.

I lack the magnificent richness of color that animates nature.

Sets of lines can say something about the direction and nature of the light. They are used by great fresco painters as a sign for shade.

In part, art completes what nature cannot elaborate; and in part it imitates nature.

It is not easy to determine the nature of music, or why any one should have a knowledge of it.

Why should I copy this owl, this sea urchin? Why should I try to imitate nature? I might just as well try to trace a perfect circle.

The art of seeing nature, or, in other words, the art of using models, is in reality the great object, the point to which all our studies are directed.

Dear God! how beauty varies in nature and art.

Many artists and scholars have pointed out that ultimately art depends on human nature.

My nature is subdued to what it works in, like the dyer's hand.

One is neither too scrupulous nor too sincere nor too submissive to nature; but one is more or less master of one's model, and, above all, of the means of expression.

Even in front of nature one must compose.

Nature generally struggles against this treatment for a while, until her powers seem in a great measure exhausted, when she quietly yields to the power of the art.

By viewing nature, nature's handmaid art, Makes mighty things from small beginnings grow: Thus fishes first to shipping did impart, Their tail the rudder, and their head the prow.

The most perfect guide is nature. Continue without fail to draw something every day.

Reduction! One wants to say more than nature and one makes the impossible mistake of wanting to say it with more means than she, instead of fewer.

I cannot attain the intensity that is unfolded before my senses. I have not the magnificent richness of colouring that animates nature.

An artist recreates those aspects of reality which represent his fundamental view of man's nature.

It is because of the servility of photography that I am fundamentally contemptuous of this chance invention which will never be an art but which plagiarizes nature by means of optics. (1848)

If the art of ship-building were in the wood, ships would exist by nature.