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.

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

If silicon had been a gas I should have been a major-general.

Paint should not be applied thick. It should be like a breath on the surface of a pane of glass.

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

Nature is usually wrong.

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?