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

The explanation is quite simple. I wished to be near my mother.

It takes a long time for a man to look like his portrait.

Nature is usually wrong.

A student of James McNeill Whistler tells the great artist, 'I tend to paint what I see.' Whistler replies, 'Ah! The shock will come when you see what you paint!

The vast majority of English folk cannot and will not consider a picture as a picture, apart from any story which it may be supposed to tell.

As light fades and the shadows deepen, all petty and exacting details vanish, everything trivial disappears, and I see things as they are in great strong masses: the buttons are lost, but the sitter remains; the sitter is lost, but the shadow remains; the shadow is lost, but the picture remains. And that, night cannot efface from the painter's imagination.