An artist's career always begins tomorrow

Art happens-no hovel is safe from it, no prince may depend upon it, the vastest intelligence cannot bring it about.

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

It is for the artist... in portrait painting to put on canvas something more than the face the model wears for that one day; to paint the man, in short, as well as his features.

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.

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!

We look at a painting to know the painter; it's his company we are after, not his skill.