James Mcneill Whistler

Famous quotes containing the words mcneill whistler, james, mcneill and/or whistler:

    Yes, madam, Nature is creeping up.
    —James Mcneill Whistler (1834–1903)

    That reality is ‘independent’ means that there is something in every experience that escapes our arbitrary control. If it be a sensible experience it coerces our attention; if a sequence, we cannot invert it; if we compare two terms we can come to only one result. There is a push, an urgency, within our very experience, against which we are on the whole powerless, and which drives us in a direction that is the destiny of our belief.
    —William James (1842–1910)

    If the man who paints only the tree, or flower, or other surface he sees before him were an artist, the king of artists would be the photographer. It is for the artist to do something beyond this: in portrait painting to put on canvas something more than the face the model wears for that one day; to paint the man, in short, as well as his features.
    —James Mcneill Whistler (1834–1903)

    To say of a picture, as is often said in its praise, that it shows great and earnest labour, is to say that it is incomplete and unfit for view.
    —James Mcneill Whistler (1834–1903)