To say to the painter that Nature is to be taken as she is, is to say to the player that he may sit on the piano.

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.

Industry in art is a necessity - not a virtue - and any evidence of the same, in the production, is a blemish, not a quality; a proof, not of achievement, but of absolutely insufficient work, for work alone will efface the footsteps of work.

Nature is usually wrong.

Art is limited to the infinite, and beginning there cannot progress.

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

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.