I maintain that two and two would continue to make four, in spite of the whine of the amateur for three, or the cry of the critic for five.

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.

If other people are going to talk, conversation becomes impossible.

Listen! There was never an artistic period. There was never an art-loving nation.

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

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.

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