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Academy acquired admiration advantage ancient appear artist attempt attention beauty become called certainly character colour common composition conduct considered continually copy correct criticism defects difficulty dignity discourse distinguished drawing dress Edited effect employed endeavour equally excellence expression figure finished fixed follow genius give given grace greater greatest habit hand higher highest ideas imagination imitation instance invention Italy kind knowledge labour learned least less light lived look manner masters means method Michel Angelo mind minute nature necessary never object observed opinion original ornaments painters painting particular perfection perhaps picture possessed practice present principles proceed produced proper Raffaelle reason received recommend represented respect Reynolds rules Sculpture seems seen sense simplicity speak Students style sufficient suppose taste things thought tion true truth variety whole wish
Popular passages
Page 30 - There is no excellent Beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion. A man cannot tell, whether Apelles or Albert Durer were the more trifler; whereof the one would make a personage by geometrical proportions, the other by taking the best parts out of divers faces to make one Excellent.
Page 266 - I have taken another course, one more suited to my abilities, and to the taste of the times in which I live. Yet however unequal I feel myself" to that attempt, were I now to begin the world again, I would tread in the steps of that great master : to kiss the hem of his garment, to catch the slightest of his perfections, would be glory and distinction enough for an ambitious man.
Page 75 - ... a much more favourable disposition from their readers, and have a much more captivating and liberal air than he who attempts to examine, coldly, whether there are any means by which this art may be acquired; how the mind may be strengthened and expanded, and what guides will show the way to eminence. It is very natural...
Page 81 - The greatest natural genius cannot subsist on its own stock : he who resolves never to ransack any mind but his own, will be soon reduced, from mere barrenness, to the poorest of all imitations; he will be obliged to imitate himself, and to repeat what he has before often repeated. When we know the subject designed by such men, it will never be difficult to guess what kind of work is to be produced.
Page 213 - ... is, and ought to be, in many points of view, and strictly speaking, no imitation at all of external nature. Perhaps it ought to be as far removed from the vulgar idea of imitation as the refined civilized...
Page 270 - Angelo ; with all the rest of the cant of Criticism, which he emitted with that volubility which generally those orators have, who annex no ideas to their words. As we were passing through the rooms, in our way to the Gallery, I made him observe a whole length of Charles the First, by Vandyck, as a perfect representation of the character as well as the figure of the man.
Page 29 - ... the whole beauty and grandeur of the art consists, in my opinion, in being able to get above all singular forms, local customs, particularities, and details of every kind.
Page 275 - Maratti, and from thence to the very bathos of insipidity to which they are now sunk; so that there is no need of remarking, that where I mentioned the Italian painters in opposition to the Dutch, I mean not the moderns, but the heads of the old Roman and Bolognian Schools; nor did I mean to include, in my idea of an Italian painter, the Venetian school, which may be said to be the Dutch part of the Italian genius. I have only to add a word of advice to the Painters, — that, however excellent they...
Page 28 - This great ideal perfection and beauty are not to be sought in the heavens, but upon earth. They are about us, and upon every side of us.
Page 220 - Garrick, has been as ignorantly praised by his friend Fielding; who doubtless imagined he had hit upon an ingenious device, by introducing in one of his novels (otherwise a work of the highest merit) an ignorant man, mistaking Garrick's representation of a scene in Hamlet for reality.
Bibliographic information
| Title | The Discourses Volume 21 of The Camelot series |
| Author | Sir Joshua Reynolds |
| Publisher | Scott, 1887 |
| Original from | Harvard University |
| Digitized | 19 Jul 2007 |
| Length | 283 pages |
| Export Citation | BiBTeX EndNote RefMan |