John Singer Sargent: "Sketch everything and keep your curiosity fresh!"

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

• "I do not judge, I only chronicle".

• "Mine is the horny hand of toil".

• "No small dabs of colour - you want plenty of paint to paint with".

• "A portrait is a picture in which there is just a tiny little something not quite right about the mouth".

• "You can't do sketches enough. Sketch everything and keep your curiosity fresh".

• "The thicker you paint, the more it flows".

• "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".

• "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".

• "A portrait is a painting with something wrong with the mouth".

• "If you begin with the middle-tone and work up from it toward the darks so that you deal last with your highest lights and darkest darks, you avoid false accents".

• "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".

• "Make the best of an emergency".

• "It is certain that at certain times talent entirely overcomes thought or poetry".

• "A person with normal eyesight would have nothing to know in the way of 'Impressionism' unless he were in a blinding light or in the dusk or dark".