John Singer Sargent Quotes

"I have now got a bombproof shelter [the Continent] into which I retire when I sniff the coming portrait or its trajectory."
-John Singer Sargent

"Every time I paint a portrait I lose a friend."
-John Singer Sargent in Art quotes.

"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."
-John Singer Sargent

"I don't dig beneath the surface for things that don't appear before my own eyes."
-John Singer Sargent

"A portrait is a painting with something wrong with the mouth."
-John Singer Sargent

"Mine is the horny hand of toil."
-John Singer Sargent

"I do not judge, I only chronicle."
-John Singer Sargent

"Color is an inborn gift, but appreciation of value is merely training of the eye, which everyone ought to be able to acquire."
-John Singer Sargent