A picture is finished when all trace of the means used to bring about the end has disappeared.

Frederic Leighton to James McNeill Whistler: 'My dear Whistler, you leave your pictures in such a sketchy, unfinished state. Why don't you ever finish them?' James McNeill Whistler to Frederic Leighton: 'My dear Leighton, why do you ever begin yours?

I can't tell you if genius is hereditary, because heaven has granted me no offspring.

An artist's career always begins tomorrow

If the man who paints only the tree, or flower, or other surface he sees before him were an artist, the king of artists would be the photographer. It is for the artist to do something beyond this.

To say of a picture, as is often said in its praise, that it shows great and earnest labour, is to say that it is incomplete and unfit for view.

People will forgive anything but beauty and talent. So I am doubly unpardonable.