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The mind is but a barren soil a soil which is soon exhausted, and will produce no crop, or only one, unless it be continually fertilized and enriched with foreign matter.

Joshua Reynolds

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Joshua Reynolds
Age: 69 †
Born: 1723
Born: January 1
Died: 1792
Died: January 1
Painter
Plympton St Mary
Sir Joshua Reynolds
Sir Joshua Reynold
Sir Joshua Raynolds
Sir Reynolds
Sir Joshua Reynolds RA
Joshua Reynolds Sir
J.
Sir Reynolds
Joshua
Sir Reynolds
Joshua Reynolds (Sir)
sir j. reynolds
S. J. Reynolds
Sir J. Reynods
j. reynolds
Sir J. Reynold
Sir J. Reynoulds
S.J. Reynolds
Sir Jos Reynolds
[Sir Joshua Reynolds]
Mr. Reynolds
Unless
Barren
Learning
Crops
Political
Continually
Matter
Exhausted
Mind
Soil
Foreign
Fertilized
Soon
Enriched
Produce
Crop

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Every art, like our own, has in its composition fluctuating as well as fixed principles. It is an attentive inquiry into their difference that will enable us to determine how far we are influenced by custom and habit, and what is fixed in the nature of things.
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Simplicity is an exact mediumbetween too little and too much.
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And he who does not know himself does not know others, so it may be said with equal truth, that he who does not know others knows himself but very imperfectly.
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Our Exhibitions [The Royal Academy] have... a mischievous tendency, by seducing the Painter to an ambition of pleasing indiscriminately the mixed multitude of people who resort to them.
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Poetry operates by raising our curiosity, engaging the mind by degrees to take an interest in the event, keeping that event suspended, and surprising at last with an unexpected catastrophe.
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The painter of genius will not waste a moment upon those smaller objects which only serve to catch the sense, to divide the attention, and to counteract his great design of speaking to the heart.
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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 other painters. This appears more humiliating, but is equally true and no man can be an artist, whatever he may suppose, upon any other terms.
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The great use of copying, if it be at all useful, should seem to be in learning color yet even coloring will never be perfectly attained by servilely copying the model before you.
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The excellence of every art, must consist in the complete accomplishment of its purpose
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Few have been taught to any purpose who have not been their own teachers.
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By close inspection... you will discover the manner of handling the artifices of contrast, glazing, and other expedients, by which good colorists have raised the value of their tints, and by which nature has been so happily imitated.
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Reform is a work of time a national taste, however wrong it may be, cannot be totally changed at once.
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The great end of all arts is to make an impression on the imagination and the feeling. The imitation of nature frequently does this. Sometimes it fails and something else succeeds.
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Style in painting is the same as in writing a power over materials, whether words or colors, by which conceptions or sentiments are conveyed.
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I do not see in what manner practice alone can be sufficient for the production of correct, excellent, and finished pictures. Works deserving this character never were produced, nor ever will arise, from memory alone.
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Though colour may appear at first a part of painting merely mechanical, yet it still has its rules, and those grounded upon that presiding principle which regulates both the great and the little in the study of a painter.
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There is no expedient to which a man will not resort to avoid the real labor of thinking.
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Art in its perfection is not ostentatious it lies hid and works its effect, itself unseen.
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It is vain for painters... to endeavour to invent without materials on which the mind may work.
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An eye critically nice can only be formed by observing well-colored pictures with attention.
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