Every time I paint a portrait I lose a friend.

I hate to paint portraits! I hope never to paint another portrait in my life. Portraiture may be all right for a man in his youth, but after forty I believe that manual dexterity deserts one, and, besides, the color-sense is less acute. Youth can better stand the exactions of a personal kind that are inseparable from portraiture. I have had enough of it.

Cultivate an ever continuous power of observation. Wherever you are, be always ready to make slight notes of postures, groups and incidents. Store up in the mind... a continuous stream of observations from which to make selections later. Above all things get abroad, see the sunlight and everything that is to be seen.

Cultivate an ever-continuous power of observation. Wherever you are, be always ready to make slight notes of postures, groups and incidents.

I don't dig beneath the surface for things that don't appear before my own eyes.

Every time I paint a portrait I lose a friend.

An artist painting a picture should have at his side a man with a club to hit him over the head when the picture is finished.