John Constable Quotes

I never saw an ugly thing in my life: for let the form of an object be what it may - light, shade, and perspective will always make it beautiful.

Light - dews - breezes - bloom - and freshness; not one of which... has yet been perfected on the canvas of any painter in the world.

It will be difficult to name a class of landscape in which the sky is not the key note, the standard of scale, and the chief organ of sentiment.

It is the soul that sees; the outward eyes Present the object, but the Mind descries. We see nothing till we truly understand it.

The sound of water escaping from mill-dams, etc., willows, old rotten planks, slimy posts, and brickwork.those scenes made me a painter and I am grateful.

The sky is the source of light in Nature and it governs everything.

We see nothing till we truly understand it.

When I sit down to make a sketch from nature, the first thing I try to do is to forget that I have ever seen a picture.

An artist who is self-taught is taught by a very ignorant person indeed.

Turner has outdone himself; he seems to paint with tinted steam, so evanescent and so airy.

Speaking to a lawyer about pictures is something like talking to a butcher about humanity.

Connoisseurs think the art is already done.

But You know Landscape is my mistress - 'tis to her that I look for fame - and all that the warmth of the imagination renders dear to Man.

A gentleman's park is my aversion. It is not beauty because it is not nature.

We must bear in recollection that the sentiment of the picture is that of solemnity, not gaiety & nothing garish, but the contrary - yet it must be bright, clear, alive fresh, and all the front seen.

Verse is a mechanism by which we can create interpretative illusions suggesting profoundities of response and understanding which far exceed the engagement or research of the writer.

I never saw an ugly thing in my life.

Painting is with me but another word for feeling.

The climax of absurdity to which art may be carried when led away from nature by fashion, may be best seen in the works of Boucher.

I don't mind parting with the corn, but not with the field in which it was raised.

I know very well what I am about and that my skies have not been neglected, though they often failed in execution - and often no doubt from over anxiety about them.

I am anxious that the world should be inclined to look to painters for information about painting.

I paint by all the daylight we have and that is little enough, less perhaps than you have by much... imagine to yourself how a purl must look through a burnt glass.

I do not consider myself at work unless I am before a six-foot canvas.

A sketch will not serve more than one state of mind & will not serve to drink at again & again — in a sketch there is nothing but the one state of mind — that which you were in at the time.

It is always my endeavour however in making a picture that it should be without a companion in the world. At least such should be a painters ambition.

The world is rid of Lord Byron, but the deadly slime of his touch still remains.

There has never been a boy painter, nor can there be. The art requires a long apprenticeship, being mechanical, as well as intellectual.

No man who can do any one thing well will be able to any different thing equally well.

Only think that I am now writing in a room full of Claudes... almost of the summit of my earthly ambitions.

My art flatters nobody by imitation, it courts nobody by smoothness, nobody by petitelieness without either fal-de-lal or fiddle-de-dee; how then can I hope to be popular?

Painting is a science, and should be pursued as an inquiry into the laws of nature.

The landscape painter must walk in the fields with a humble mind. No arrogant man was ever permitted to see Nature in all her beauty.