Quote #2
Invention, strictly speaking, is little more than a new combination of those images which have been previously gathered and deposited in the memory: nothing can come of nothing.
More from Joshua Reynolds
- What is a well-chosen collection of pictures, but walls hung round with thoughts?
- You must have no dependence on your own genius. If you have great talents, industry will improve them; if you have but moderate abilities, …
- A mere copier of nature can never produce any thing great, can never raise and enlarge the conceptions, or warm the heart of the spectator.
- Could we teach taste or genius by rules, they would be no longer taste and genius.
- If deceiving the eye were the only business of the art, there is no doubt, indeed, but the minute painter would be more apt to succeed; but…
- A painter must compensate the natural deficiencies of his art. He has but one sentence to utter, but one moment to exhibit. He cannot, like…
- Words should be employed as the means, not as the end: language is the instrument, conviction is the work.
- A painter must not only be of necessity an imitator of the works of nature...but he must be as necessarily an imitator of the works of othe…